Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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That time Yiddishists met extraterrestrials a short while ago in a galaxy not far away
It was a normal summer internship at the Yiddish Book Center ... until the Jedi invaded our turf
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Everything You Wanted To Know About ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ But Didn’t Ask
Wonder of Wonders By Alisa Solomon Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32 Those searching for razzle-dazzle bar mitzvah entertainment need look no further than the Amazing Bottle Dancers, a group of athletic young men who’ll burst into your special event, hoist the guest of honor up onto a chair, perform the suspenseful “bottle dance” from the…
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Books A Uniquely Israeli Vision of the Afterlife
The World of the End By Ofir Touché Gafla Translated by Mitch Ginsburg Tor Books, 368 pages, $16.98 A recent cartoon published in the New Yorker shows a group of people standing by a grave. A woman is speaking, and the caption reads, “Wherever he is, I know he’ll be upgraded.” Might the afterworld —…
The Latest
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Books Portrait of the Publisher as a Young Renegade
Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist By Jay A. Gertzman University Press of Florida, 416 pages, $74.95 Biographies of book publishers are scarce, though the possibility of one or another is frequently announced, never to appear. Their lives, I once conjectured, had too many uncomfortable secrets that couldn’t be revealed, even after they’ve died. Consider that no…
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Books She Was a Novelist, Chicago-Born
‘Yudl’: And Selected Short Stories By Layle Silbert Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, $17.95 Layle Silbert’s “Yudl” opens with the protagonist, an immigrant Jew with a thick accent and heavy socialist leanings, inspecting a building that appears incomplete. “With its empty unglassed windows,” the three-story-high, red brick building “could be a new building not yet…
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In Ramsgate, Searching For the Legacy of Sir Moses Montefiore
Walking around the depressed Ramsgate of today, it is somewhat difficult to imagine that when the financier Sir Moses Montefiore purchased a country estate here in 1831, this seaside settlement was considered the height of sophistication and chic. Located on a far easterly point of the Kentish coast of England, bereft of the holidaymakers that…
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Backward Exclusive: Zuckerberg on Bloomberg’s ‘Nobel’ Prize
Mark Zuckerberg is livid. “I can’t believe they gave the Genesis Prize to that tiny tiny man,” the founder, CEO and control-freak-in-chief of YouFace spluttered while sipping a latte from a Starbucks in San Francisco, a small town he owns in Northern California. “I mean, it’s not like he, needs the money. Those of us…
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The Secret Jewish History of Steve Jobs And Apple
Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs – who is currently being portrayed by Ashton Kutcher in the biopic “Jobs” — was the biological child of a Syrian-born father and a Swiss-American Catholic mother who gave him up for adoption at birth. He was raised in northern California by a working-class couple — Paul Reinhold Jobs and his…
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The Fine Jewish Art of Burlesque
Sometimes they hold hands; other times they dance by themselves. But make no mistake: The Schlep Sisters— Minnie Tonka and Darlinda Just Darlinda — are emotionally committed to each other as they peel off their clothes in a burlesque parody of sibling love gone demented. To the tune of The Barry Sisters warbling in Yiddish,…
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Books Will We Ever Be Forgiven for the Holocaust?
The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never. The shocking psychological truth is that man rejects the burden of guilt by turning the tables on those we have wronged and portraying ourselves as the victims of their suffering. The Roman historian Tacitus spells it out. “It is part of human life,”…
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Books How I Learned Not To Be J.D. Salinger
Back in high school, I was friends with the Salinger boys, but I wasn’t really one of them. As I recall it now, there were three: John, Thom and Barnaby (I’ve changed two of their names and I’ve left one the same, for reasons you’ll probably figure out later). You could recognize the Salinger boys…
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How Famed French Artists Came To Identify Themselves With a Hebrew Name
A major art exhibition that opened in September at the Hermitage Amsterdam museum features works by three post-Impressionist French painters: Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis — the first two better known to the general public than the third. They were, according to the museum’s press release, “briefly united with a few other artists……
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Most Popular
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News An Alabama millionaire offered Jews $50,000 to move to his town. 16 years later, what’s left?
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Culture Why is Israel’s attack on Iran called ‘Rising Lion’ — and what does the Bible have to do with it?
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News ‘Very misguided’: ADL regional board member resigns over organization’s approach to antisemitism and civil rights
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Culture His parents fled the Nazis in 1937 — now he’s using his chutzpah to fight Donald Trump
In Case You Missed It
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Antisemitism Decoded The far-right is saying Jews don’t serve in the military — they’re wrong
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Opinion Might Iran become Trump’s Iraq? Americans are wary — but shouldn’t be
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News Why isn’t a pro-Israel lobbying group considered a foreign agent?
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Yiddish ווידעאָ: אַ חסיד פֿאָרט קיין איראַן צו געפֿינען אסתּר המלכּהס קבֿרVIDEO: Hasidic Jew goes to Iran to find Queen Esther’s tomb
אַבֿרהם שוואַרץ איז געפאָרן אַהין מיט דרײַ חדשים צוריק, נישט וויסנדיק אַז אין גיכן וועט צווישן איראַן און ישׂראל אויסברעכן אַ מלחמה.
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