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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Golden Era for Jewish Life Under the Habsburgs
My great-grandfather, born on April 20, 1892 in Vienna, was drafted into the Imperial and Royal “k.u.k.” Army of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire during World War I. As a physician for the police, he was stationed at the Isonzo in present-day Slovenia, where battles against the Italian army cost more than half a million lives….
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Film & TV WATCH: Project X, Or Eternal Sunshine of the Palestinian Mind
Samer Bisharat, star of Oscar-nominated “Omar,” in Project X / YouTube If you’ve ever seen the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” you’ll immediately be reminded of it after watching the newly released short film “Project X.” The basic plot is the same. Except instead of Jim Carrey trying to erase Kate Winslet from…
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Brooklyn Nags Breathe a Sigh of Relief at ‘King of the Horse Poisoners’ Capture
1914 • 100 years ago Attack of the Horse Poisoner Hyman Edelstein, or, as he is known to the police, the “King of the Horse Poisoners,” was arraigned in a Brooklyn courtroom for having allegedly approached a Brooklyn horse handler, Charles Rosenbaum, demanding $100 or he would “poison his nags.” Rosenbaum handled the situation cleverly,…
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Zayd Dohrn’s ‘Muckrakers’ Is Ripped From His Radical Royalty Bloodline
Zayd Dohrn’s ripped-from-the-headlines “Muckrakers” is a drama about transparency in the digital age that asks: When does disclosure of the public and personal become too much openness? The one-act play was inspired in part by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ exposure of Chelsea Manning’s Iraq and Afghan war revelations. Assange’s alleged sex scandal also informed the…
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‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Turns 50 With an All-Star Celebration
Zalmen Mlotek, artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre (aka Folksbiene) doesn’t seem too surprised — indeed, he sounds matter-of-fact — that the iconic theater is marking its 100th birthday and still going strong. But, he acknowledges its founders, who opened the theater’s doors on the Lower East Side for Yiddish speaking Eastern European immigrants, would…
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My Father, My Self
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Hamlet, Act II, scene 2 It was his suggestion. We could work together on his obituary: father and son. In his final days, it would be another way to connect and smooth things over if there were any lingering bits of resentment. It was early…
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Is ‘Death of Klinghoffer’ Opera Really Anti-Semitic?
(Haaretz) — The contemporary opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” has been fraught with conflict since its premiere, and is poised to be as divisive when it is performed by the Metropolitan Opera here in November, and simultaneously transmitted in high definition to movie theaters around the world. The 1991 opera, by composer John Adams and librettist…
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How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Vladimir Jabotinsky
Jabotinsky: A Life By Hillel Halkin Yale University Press, 256 pages, $25 Hillel Halkin’s new biography, “Jabotinsky: A Life,” features as its frontispiece a 1918 photograph of the activist and author in his British military uniform. It’s an excellent choice of illustration that captures several of the paradoxes of his character. The baby-faced infantry officer…
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Cliffs’ Notes on Jabotinsky
Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky was a Zionist activist almost from the get-go. He was born in 1880 in Odessa, Ukraine, a Black Sea city that was home to the 19th-century Jewish intellectual and literary elite of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. He spent his early years as a journalist in Europe and in Russia; he mastered…
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Diving Back Into Henry Roth’s Streams of Consciousness
Mercy of a Rude Stream By Henry Roth Liveright, 1312 pages, $39.95. Henry Roth was rediscovered twice. In 1964, 30 years after the debut of “Call It Sleep,” an enticing new paperback edition and ecstatic praise from Irving Howe on the front page of The New York Times Book Review catapulted Roth’s neglected masterpiece onto…
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No, Amos Oz, We Shouldn’t Call Settlers Jewish ‘Neo-Nazis’
Amos Oz, probably the most widely acclaimed of all living Israeli authors, has been both criticized and defended for saying several weeks ago that Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria engaged in acts of violence and vandalism toward Arabs were “a monster that needs to be called what it is: Hebrew neo-Nazi groups.” Not all…
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Music For Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, an 85-minute playlist
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Yiddish פּאָדקאַסט: אַ לעבעדיקער שמועס אויף ייִדיש מיט דער אַקטריסע ליאַ קעניג Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig
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News AIPAC is funneling pro-Israel money to candidates and covering its tracks