This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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The Origins of Yiddish: Part Tsvey
In last week’s column dealing with two recent articles about the origins of Eastern European Yiddish, I dwelled more on the first — Cherie Woodworth’s account of the “standard theory” most systematically worked out by the great Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich (1894–1969) and of some of its problematic aspects that have led to the adoption…
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Why Jewish Artists Continue To Be Inspired by The Bible
Art historian Samantha Baskind, author of, among others, “Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art” and the Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists, now tackles thorny problems of identity and representation in her latest book. “Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America” asks why several modern American Jewish artists were inspired by biblical…
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Holocaust Survivors’ Stories as Cartoons
There’s a painting of Hitler with an almost Picasso-esquely skewed face, and a blue coat. There’s a painting of a boy in a brown suit peering at a swastika painted on a wall. And then there are paintings of houses, people taking walks, forests and trees, lots of trees. In other words, the paintings of…
The Latest
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The Charmed Life of Charmed Bracelets
Mamie Eisenhower had one, and if you came of age during the 1950s, chances are you had one, too. I’m referring to the charm bracelet, that metallic cluster of miniaturized icons that hung from, and often strained, the wrist of every self-respecting, well-dressed woman in postwar America. As much a fad in its day as…
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Ellen Willis and Me
The Essential Ellen Willis By Ellen Willis Edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz University of Minnesota Press, 536 pages, $24.95 Ellen Willis died in 2006, but her voice still echoes in the culture. Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, an editor and writer for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, founder…
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The True Story of Maine’s Potato King — My Great-Grandfather’s Rise and Fall
My grandmother grew up in a big house on a hill in Fort Kent, Maine, a few hundred yards from the Canadian border. The house had a porch and a turret and, in the bathroom, a Jewish ritual bath. My grandmother’s mother was a religious fanatic. Her father, Jake Etscovitz, was the Potato King. Though…
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A Tale of Twins Who Are Connected — Very Closely
To hear it described, or perhaps even to watch it, the thing can seem uncomfortably like a “Family Guy” fantasy-cutaway parody of a Broadway musical. Consider, especially, its finale: two women, quite literally joined at the hip, belting a tender, plaintive anthem titled “I Will Never Leave You.” There is the pathos, the self-seriousness, the…
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Books Joan Rivers Storms Out of CNN Interview
Apparently all that plastic surgery didn’t give Joan Rivers a thick skin. On July 5, Joan Rivers made headlines after she stormed out of a CNN interview claiming the anchor, Fredricka Whitfield, was asking increasingly “negative questions.” Rivers, known for her (sometimes) off-color jokes has picked on everyone from Paula Deen to the Jennifer Lawrence….
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How Liturgy Can Co-Exist With Backstreet Boys and The Wu-Tang Clan
I doubt many of the attendees at Kehilat Hadar’s Upper West Side Yom Kippur services, at which the “Lamedvavnik Niggun” made its debut liturgical appearance last fall, knew the story behind the tune. I do, because I cooked it up with Aryeh Bernstein, who leads high holiday services at Hadar. We borrowed the melody from…
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Books How Lee Grant Recovered From the Blacklist
“Some working actors lost the best years of their lives and don’t know why.” Those words were written by actress/director Lee Grant in her new memoir, “I Said Yes To Everything.” And she should know. She was one of them. Grant was the “surprise discovery” of the 1950 Broadway season for her role in “Detective…
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‘Seinfeld’ Revolutionized Pop Culture 25 Years Ago — and That’s a Bad Thing
Every era gets the sitcom it deserves. In the early 90s that sitcom was “Seinfeld,” a show about a motley collection of Jews on the upper west side of Manhattan, kvetching, kvelling and ordering soup. And now, 25 years after its premiere, Seinfeld can be seen as a turning point not only in American comedy,…
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