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
-
Books
Why Marshall Was Never on the Supreme Court
Earlier this week, M. M. Silver wrote about the riches in Louis Marshall’s archive and explored why it took so long for someone to write a full-length biography of this important figure in American Jewish history. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
-
Sometimes Isaiah Berlin Felt Like a Fox, Sometimes He Felt Like a Hedgehog
‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Rarely have so few words — a fragment of poetry from the sixth-century Greek poet Archilochus — come to mean so much. Sixty years ago, with the publication of his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin yoked these little critters to…
-
Books Author Blog: Transforming the Magical
Earlier this week, Baruch and Judy Sterman wrote about their obsession with blue. Their 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 the series, please visit: We were sitting in an upscale café in Northern Tel Aviv waiting…
The Latest
-
Netanyahu Sets Meeting With Peres To Request Extension in Forming Government
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with President Shimon Peres to request an extension in forming a government. Their meeting was scheduled for Saturday night at the end of Shabbat, which is the deadline for forming a government. Under law, Netanyahu can request an up to two-week extension, which Peres already has said he…
-
Yo La Tengo, In Media Res, QED?
We are born into the middle of life and it’s only when our powers to affect our surroundings are fading that we begin to glimpse where it is that we were, and what we might have done. Though “Ohm,” the opening track of “Fade,” starts with an insistent beat that recalls Steve Reich’s “Different Trains”…
-
Tending Bar and Talking Faith With Jewish Drinking Columnist Rosie Schaap
● Drinking With Men: A Memoir By Rosie Schaap Riverhead Books, 272 pages, $26.95 As Rosie Schaap remembers it, in 1987, at the age of 16, she took the advice of her guidance counselor and dropped out of high school to follow the Grateful Dead. She sold beads and tie-dyed T-shirts to support herself, went…
-
Books Can Israel Help American Jews Recall Forgotten Heroes?
Earlier this week, M. M. Silver wrote about the riches in Louis Marshall’s archive. His 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 the series, please visit: Now that my previous blog post established to everyone’s complete satisfaction…
-
Books Sami Rohr Prize Finalists Announced
The Jewish Book Council has announced the finalists for this year’s Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The $100,000 prize is one of the largest literary awards in the world and recognizes emerging writers who examine the Jewish experience. It is given for fiction and non-fiction in alternating years. This year’s fiction finalists include Shani…
-
Books Ben Schrank and Joshua Furst Debate Judaism and Art
Ben Schrank and author and frequent Forward contributor Joshua Furst met up at The Brooklyn Inn with the intention of drinking some beer and discussing fiction, Brooklyn and their complicated relationships with Jewishness. Schrank recently published his wise, big-hearted new novel, “Love Is a Canoe.” Since much of the story revolves around publishing and the…
-
Books Author Blog: Obsession in Blue
Baruch and Judy Sterman’s “The Rarest Blue: The Remarkable Story of an Ancient Color Lost to History and Rediscovered” is now available. Their 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 the series, please visit: We admit it,…
-
‘Yip’ Harburg’s All-American Lyrics Came With a Heaping Helping of Yiddishkeit
Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist By Harriet Hyman Alonso Wesleyan Univeristy Press, 332 pages, $28.95 The tragic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” the idealistic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the raucous “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” were all co-written by the same American Jewish lyricist, E. Y. Harburg (1896–1981), and all owe…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Film & TV The new ‘Superman’ is being called anti-Israel, but does that make it pro-Palestine?
- 2
Fast Forward Tucker Carlson calls for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army
- 3
Opinion This German word explains Trump’s authoritarian impulses — and Hitler’s rise to power
- 4
Music ‘No matter what, I will always be a Jew.’ Billy Joel opens up about his family’s Holocaust history
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Americans keep getting killed in the West Bank. Here’s how the US could fight that awful trend
-
Culture Katz’s Deli is a mecca for food influencers — it kills me to see them butcher its good name
-
Film & TV Whoever said ‘you can’t take it with you’ never reckoned with this Jewish patriarch
-
Fast Forward Students at Netanyahu’s Pennsylvania high school want him ejected from the alumni hall of fame
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
