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 Hank Greenberg Story That ’42’ Forgot
Anyone seeing “42” would be horrified at the hostility Jackie Robinson faced from his teammates and opposing players and catcalling from the stands when he integrated Major League Baseball. What the film did not depict was the reported encounter Robinson had with the one baseball player who could best understand the prejudice the Civil Rights…
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Books Taking Yiddish Translation to the Masses
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Academics and enthusiasts of Yiddish studies have long been pushing for the translation of Yiddish literature. Unfortunately, few efforts have met with much success, even among Jewish readers. The New Yiddish Library Series, from Yale University Press, had plans to translate and publish dozens of Yiddish…
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Books Ordinary German Citizens During World War II
In her first installment of “Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear,” Randy Susan Meyers wrote about an essay in which the writer met with an elderly former SS officer. Her newest novel, “The Comfort of Lies,” is now available. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My…
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Vladimir Nabokov and the Jews
Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian American author of such novels as “Lolita,” “Pnin,” and “Pale Fire,” was a compassionate observer of modern Jewish history. This has been established in such works as Stacy Schiff’s “Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov),” a 1999 study of the writer’s much beloved Jewish wife; essays by critics Maxim Shrayer and Shalom Goldman,…
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Books Inspired by Gluckel of Hameln
This week Rebecca Miller will be sharing texts that shed light on Jewish life in 18th-century France, the setting of her new novel, “Jacob’s Folly” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on…
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Books Collective Guilt vs. Collective Fear
Randy Susan Meyers’s most recent book, “The Comfort of Lies,” is now available. She is also the author of “The Murderer’s Daughters,” a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on…
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The History of Mel Brooks, Part I
Ironically, it was Mel Brooks who asked the first question: “So, how long have you been working for the Jewish Daily Forward?” Then he wondered aloud how I spell my name, and he graded my response. “You got all the letters right,” he said, and laughed when I ask for extra credit for getting them…
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How Do You Say ‘Fuhgeddaboudit’ in Yiddish?
‘What’s Fuhgeddaboudit in Yiddish?” The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephens asks in a column in which he concludes that, following President Obama’s Syrian chemical weapons shuffle, the president’s promise to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon has lost its credibility. Was Stephens suggesting that “Fuhgeddaboudit” is an English version of an original Yiddish expression?…
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Film & TV When the Jewish Mother and Son Get Their Day on the Silver Screen
A Jewish mother gives her son two ties on the first night of Hanukkah. The following morning, when he comes down for breakfast, he is wearing one of them. The mom says, “What’s the matter — you didn’t like the other one?” — Sheldon Kimmelman in “Old Jews Telling Jokes” Even while guffawing at old…
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How a 1976 Exhibit Changed the Way We Think About Jewish History
We don’t often think of ideas and concepts as having a biography or, better yet, a pedigree or yikhes. But like people, they also partake of the life cycle: Ideas, too, come from somewhere before going out on their own. And so it is with the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which recently…
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Cantors Consider Joining the AFL-CIO
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. 100 years ago 1913 From the shtetl of Romanov, in the Mogilev Gubernia, comes news of…
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Opinion A Reichstag fire is blazing in Trump’s America and we know exactly who is fanning the flames
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Yiddish נײַ בוך וועגן אַמאָליקן ניו־יאָרק איז ווי אַ סעודה פֿאַר ייִדישיסטןNew book about old New York City is like a feast for Yiddishists
דער מחבר הענעך סאַפּאָזשניק איז אַ גאָר פֿעיִקער װעגװײַזער איבער אַ פֿאַרלוירענער װעלט.
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Fast Forward Philadelphia Jewish museum won’t re-hang Israeli flag now after it was vandalized twice in a week
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Fast Forward Two congregations, two opinions as Torahs hit the floor at separate NYC services
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