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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Books
Unread Family Letters Open Window Onto Life on the Eve of the Holocaust
On my first trip to Israel, just hours after I landed in Tel Aviv, my Israeli cousin Benny told me that he had nearly 300 family letters dating back to the 1930s and ’40s. I had come to Israel to research a book about the family that Benny and I have in common, and this…
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Books Meet the Pope’s Jewish Bookbinder
Those of you who have strayed through antiquarian bookshops will have, on occasion, chanced upon particularly unique-looking books. Perhaps a volume bound and covered in leather or vellum, as likely or not adorned with ornate designs or engravings. Maybe the cover has been embossed with an ancient typeface? These books might have special features such…
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Books In ‘Like Dreamers’ a Paratrooper from the 1967 War Dives Into the Settler Movement
Yossi Klein Halevi’s new book, “Like Dreamers,” is about seven of the paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. It is their story and Israel’s story in the years that unfolded. In this excerpt, the first of two being published by the Forward, two of those paratroopers, Hanan Porat and Yoel…
The Latest
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Books The Ordinary Women Who Committed Nazi Atrocities
In her latest book, “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” American historian Wendy Lower takes on an under-examined aspect of Holocaust scholarship: What role did ordinary women have in perpetrating the horrors of the Third Reich? The book, for the most part, takes place not on actual killing fields, but in the…
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Books ‘My Basmati Bat Mitzvah’ — and Pew
Earlier this month, my social media feeds were full of comments about the recent Pew Study, A Portrait of Jewish Americans. Even more than the actual study though, it was the New York Times article about the findings that generated the most conversation, with its telling headline, “Poll Shows Major Shift in Identity of U.S….
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The Education of Abraham Cahan (and Seth Lipsky)
All About Ab (Cahan) from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. The Rise of Abraham Cahan By Seth Lipsky Schocken, 240 pages, $26 On the morning of August 24, 1929, an Arab mob attacked the Jewish population of Hebron. Homes were pillaged, synagogues were desecrated, and scores of people were murdered or maimed. In the final…
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Ab Cahan, the Jewish Newspaperman Who Kept the World Moving Forward
A portrait of Abraham Cahan is the first thing that greets a visitor to the Forward in New York City. It attracted me from the moment that I, then a young newspaperman in my midthirties, first stopped by the paper’s editorial rooms. It was early in 1983. Published in Yiddish and known as the Forverts,…
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‘Bageling’ Means Many Things — Not All of Them Fit for Family Paper
This comes from the Forward’s Naomi Zeveloff: “I just did a story it appeared in this newspaper’s October 4 issue on how Chabadniks figure out who is Jewish during their Sukkot street outreach. One of them described ‘bageling’ for me, by which he meant the process by which one Jew on the street subtly recognizes…
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Books Why Philip Roth Is ‘Too Jewish’ for Nobel
When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded, I knew that Philip Roth had not won. A colleague condescended: “I never liked Roth,” a put-down to me, a Miltonist and teacher of Renaissance literature, who really doesn’t know better. A couple of decades ago, someone would have mentioned the more elegant, supposedly more disciplined and…
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Sensation Rocks the Leo Frank Murder Trial
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating and edifying clippings from the Jewish past. 1913 •100 years ago Sensation at the Frank Trial A man who hopes to be a…
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Film Critic Stanley Kauffmann Dies at 97
Stanley Kauffmann, the American Jewish film critic who died on October 9 at age 97 was termed “one of the oldest working critics in history” in obits, but he was more than just a Methuselah among the thumbs-up-or-down crowd. Kauffmann’s long life gave him time to gain useful artistic experience and erudition by trying to…
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Fast Forward From Shabbat dinners to ‘Talmudic discourse’: Jewish women killed in NYC shooting leave legacies of faith and family
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BINTEL BRIEF I prepare bodies as part of my synagogue’s burial society, but I’m an anti-Zionist. Is that OK?
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