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 Most Graphic War Story Ever Told
● The Great War July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme By Joe Sacco W.W. Norton & Company, one 24-foot-long accordion-style page and a 16 page supplementary booklet, $35 Anyone with an interest in the state of Israel, its contradictions and compromises, and the sad history of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian…
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Books Poems of Heresy and Transformation
If poetry requires disclosure, I’ll start with one: I am a friend of Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s, and a fellow Yiddish poet. He sent me his book with a kind dedication, and an additional inscription in his neat hand: bet-samekh-daled. That is, the author of this book entitled “Prayers of a Heretic” noted that his signature…
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Books Randi Zuckerberg’s ‘Dot Complicated’
It’s been a good (or perhaps bad) year for normal-woman outrage. I’m still pretty irked about being told to “Lean In,” and now there is yet another book by an uber-successful (and uber-lucky) woman who thinks her life lessons apply to the rest of us. If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about former Facebook marketing…
The Latest
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The Joy of Jewish Cookbooks
“I didn’t want this exhibit to be only of interest to Jews or foodies, but to everyone,” said Janice Bluestein Longone, collector of one of the most important archives of culinary literature in America. In the 1990s she was made adjunct curator of the collection after donating the archive to the University of Michigan in…
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Who’s To Blame For the State of Today’s NFL? Try Sid Luckman
The course of the current NFL season demonstrates the great flaw of professional football: The quarterback has become too important. Teams like Green Bay Packers or Chicago Bears lose a single player — Aaron Rodgers and Jay Cutler respectively — and the entire season washes out. To understand how this crazy state of affairs came…
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Your Days Are Numbered… and So Is Just About Everything Else
Emily Koenders writes that she is working on a paper on gematria in rabbinic literature and wonders if I can help her locate the talmudic sources of three examples of it. Gematria (pronounced with a hard “g”) is the rabbinic term for finding significance in the numerical value of the letters of Hebrew words. In…
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From Orthodox Teen Lesbians To the Holocaust, An Author Courts Controversy
If I were making a list of topics I am not looking forward to discussing with my young daughters, the top three might be (and I am not sure in what order) sexual desire, the Holocaust and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. So I don’t know whether to be grateful for Leanne Lieberman’s books or…
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Two Vegetable Vendors in Brooklyn Form Romance
1913 •100 years ago Romance Over Onions Those in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn knew Sarah Goldstein, a widow for eight years, for her little fruit-and-vegetable shop on the corner of Belmont Avenue and Osborne Street. Through the shop, she became renowned for supplying the neighborhood with the best onions around. It was a surprise…
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‘Tis the Season For Holiday Synthesis
Now that doughnuts filled with pumpkin crème and potato latkes festooned with cranberry sauce have been safely consumed, and all those recently purchased menurkeys, where “the candles meet the turkey,” are stowed away until the next time they are destined to put in an appearance, it is high time, I think, to take a moment…
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What Cornelius Gurlitt Could Have Learned From Monsieur Robert Klein
Until recently, Cornelius Gurlitt, 80, possessed 1,280 pieces of art — some already known to be major works — which he kept wrapped and stored in his apartment in Munich. He enjoyed the cache, but only furtively; the man was in hiding alongside his art. Now that he’s been flushed out and interviewed, Gurlitt comes…
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Stuck Inside of Greenwich Village With the Coen Brothers Blues Again
Success always seems inevitable in retrospect. Once you’ve arrived, it must have been destined all along. But failure — especially dream-crushing, life-destroying failure — is plagued by what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. Was it just bad luck, or did you really not have what it takes? Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), the tortured protagonist of Joel and Ethan…
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Looking Forward Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement
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Opinion How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
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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
אינעם שמועס באַטייליקן זיך יניבֿ גאָלדבערג, מיכל יאַשינסקי און חיים וואָלף.
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News AIPAC is funneling pro-Israel money to candidates and covering its tracks