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
Interpreting the Holocaust Dreams of Literary Puzzle Master Georges Perec
● La Boutique Obscure By Georges Perec Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker Melville House, 214 pages, $18.95 The Anglophone world is currently undergoing one of its periodical revivals — this time, of the panegyric experimentalism and formalist frolics of the French avant-garde literary collective Oulipo. The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a…
-
Books Debut Novelist Helene Wecker Dreams of Jinnis (and Golems)
● The Golem and the Jinni By Helene Wecker HarperCollins. 496 pages, $26.99 In “The Golem and the Jinni,” Helene Wecker mines the mysticism of two peoples to masterfully create a magical world out of clay and fire. Her story is so inventive, so elegantly written, so well constructed, it is hard to believe that…
-
All Jewish on the Western Front
The Autry National Center is a gem. Tucked away in Los Angeles’s sprawling Griffith Park, the museum is packed with exhibits about the American West. There’s a stagecoach and a 19th-century fire engine, along with vintage guns and guitars. My favorite installation is the ornate saloon, all mahogany and brass, which provides a taste of…
The Latest
-
Books Discovering Louisa May Alcott’s Jewish History on Portuguese Tour
Louisa May Alcott was often told as a child that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who had similar coloring, had learned this from her father, Joseph May, a late 18th-century Boston businessman whose Portuguese Jewish ancestors immigrated to Sussex, England, just before 1500….
-
Books Growing Up Jewish in Christian Suburbia
By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass. Brandeis University, the only thing Jewish about Waltham, was 20 minutes away. We had moved to Waltham because we couldn’t stay in…
-
Books Rutu Modan’s Secrets and Revelations
The Property By Rutu Modan, translated by Jessica Cohen Drawn & Quarterly, 232 pages, $24.95 The past takes many forms in Rutu Modan’s graphic novel “The Property.” There is Regina, an elderly woman returning to Poland from Israel for the first time in over 60 years; overzealous re-enactors encountered by her granddaughter Mica on the…
-
Hannah Arendt Biopic Offers Rare Onscreen View of Political Philosophy
Biopics about philosophers are rare, and they favor activists over ivory-tower thinkers. The life of the mind, unless it directly shapes social action, is not easily captured in film. Hence, Richard Attenborough’s film “Gandhi” exposed the Indian independence leader’s ideas on nonviolent struggle through his political activism, not through his writings. Likewise, Margarethe von Trotta’s…
-
A Very Yiddish Take on the Star Spangled Banner
Frieda Danziger of Manhattan writes to ask whether I have ever encountered the Yiddish term farfl un lokshn as a comical or disparaging way of referring to the Stars and Stripes. I have, once, in a poem by Abraham Liessin, a well-known Yiddish poet. Liessin, who was born in Russia in 1872 and came to…
-
Third Century Synagogue Unearthed in Turkey
1913 •100 years ago Nursery’s heartbreaking scenes A black sign hanging on an old three-story house on the Lower East Side’s Madison Street has written on it, in golden letters: “Hebrew Day Nursery.” This means that inside is a place where they keep babies for the day while their mothers are at work. What sad…
-
Tel Aviv Exhibit About Hospitality Arrives With Some Political Baggage
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an institution in transition. The addition of the Herta and Paul Amir Building, opened to the public in 2011, effectively doubled the museum’s exhibition space. The sharply angled facade cuts across the rigid lines of the city’s Bauhaus-inspired architecture. Internally, the museum has gone through a crisis of…
-
Books Assimilation and Romanticizing the Past
Earlier this week, Joanna Hershon wrote about an insult and a memorial service she attended for a friend’s father. Her new novel, A Dual Inheritance, was published earlier this month by Ballantine Books. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series….
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
- 2
Culture In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
- 3
Opinion An abominable new Israeli law is a death warrant for democracy
- 4
Culture Inside the ancient Christian theology driving modern antisemitism
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Frankfurt cinema declines to participate in Jewish film festival, spurring backlash
-
Fast Forward Israeli, Serbian leaders denounce antisemitic statements at Belgrade protest
-
Fast Forward Palestinian-French lawmaker arrested after praising 1972 bomber of Ben Gurion Airport
-
Fast Forward Michigan Democrats, Jewish leaders uneasy over Senate candidate’s alliance with Hasan Piker
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
