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
-
Finding Passover Wisdom In The Work of Rainier Maria Rilke
Is a question profound if it has no answer? I reflected on this banality the morning after another draining Passover Seder while shuffling — fashionably late and slightly hung over — to a synagogue I found hopeful in the past. In my usual house of worship I would be recruited to lead the service in…
-
Philly Peddler’s Beard Sliced Off in Attack
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 West Philadelphia peddler Jacob Wine was accosted by one Thomas White, who,…
-
HBO Documentary Tells Story of Kindertransport That Saved 50 Children
**EDITOR’S NOTE: In honor of the 75th anniversary of the kindertransports, we remember the dramatic story of 50 Jewish children’s rescue from the Nazis, which started in Vienna and wound up Philadelphia. ** In early January of 1939, New York businessman Louis Levine traveled to Philadelphia to meet with Gilbert Kraus, the man he believed…
The Latest
-
Books The Man Who Made the Soundtrack to Our Lives
It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on the television lately without running into Clive Davis. He is promoting his memoir, “The Soundtrack of My Life” a book that might just as easily be called “The Soundtrack of Your Life.” Yes, you. Davis, 80, is a recording industry executive who helped start or…
-
Books Graphic Novelist Returns to Berlin
Miriam Katin appears naked in one panel of “Letting It Go,” her new graphic memoir about coming to terms with her past as a Holocaust survivor. But the rest of this novel-length confessional comic is even more revealing. Her first full-length work since 2006’s award-winning Holocaust memoir “We Are On Our Own,” “Letting It Go”…
-
How ‘Downton Abbey’ Plundered the Story of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
Lord Grantham is Tevye the Milkman. As the trials and tribulations marking the third season of BBC’s “Downton Abbey” came to a close, the realization hit me: Julian Fellowes has created a WASP version of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Despite obvious differences, the fundamental premise is identical: how a proud man with three daughters copes…
-
Books How Do You Solve a Problem Like the VIDA Count?
Elissa Strauss is right to note that VIDA’s third annual count of male vs. female bylines in “thought leader magazines” created a reaction that, at first, amounted to a giant shrug. Over the past few years many writers, Elissa most notable among them, have asked editors to respond to “The Count.” Most did not take…
-
Palestine Might Still Be A Better Name Than Israel
‘He’s not going to give up one inch of Eretz Israel,” New York Times columnist Roger Cohen quotes Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri as saying of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 15. And Cohen adds, by way of explanation, “Eretz Israel is a biblical term widely used to refer to the area between the…
-
Forverts Prints 150,000 Copies Per Day
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 According to official figures, the Forverts has been selling 139,960 copies of…
-
Books Rabbi Gafni’s Revenge
Earlier this week, Yuval Elizur examined religious political power in Israel and January’s elections and Lawrence Malkin discussed the tension between tradition and modernity in contemporary Judaism and its consequences. Today, Yuval Elizur reveals Rabbi Moshe Gafni’s powerful hand. Elizur and Malkin are the co-authors of the recently published “The War Within: Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Threat…
-
Austin Ratner Returns With Sophomore Novel ‘In the Land of the Living’
● In the Land of the living By Austin Ratner Reagan Arthur Books, 320 pages, $25.99. In Austin Ratner’s accomplished and moving second novel, “In the Land of the Living,” three generations of Auberon men have been angry. Erratic and volatile, Isidore’s father raises him with techniques “he’d presumably learned at the Kishinev School of…
Explore
Most Popular
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Israel just quadrupled its PR budget to $730M. Experts say it won’t work.
-
Fast Forward A synagogue helped Palestinians raise money for Gaza — and found common ground over falafel
-
Fast Forward This Jewish feminist has been the NYC’s sanitation department’s official artist for 50 years. A new movie tells her story.
-
Fast Forward House to consider bipartisan resolution condemning Hasan Piker, Candace Owens for antisemitism