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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Barbra Streisand’s brand-new duet with Bob Dylan is a whole lot different than you might think
Though Dylan and Streisand's voices may seem ill-suited to each other, the two complement each other gorgeously on 'The Very Thought of You'
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Books When I Went to Synagogue
Earlier this week, Anna Solomon wrote about Jews in the West and a grandmother’s secrets. Her novel, “The Little Bride,” is now available. Her posts are being featured this week 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:…
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Looking Back: December 2, 2011
75 Years Ago in the Forward Testimony to the Peel Commission on Palestine indicates that during the years 1934-1935, no fewer than 25,000 Arabs entered Palestine from neighboring countries. The reason so many of these illegal immigrants have come to Palestine is because conditions in their countries of origin ? most came from Syria and…
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Books Jews in America’s West
Yesterday, Anna Solomon wrote about a grandmother’s secrets. Her novel, The Little Bride, is now available. Her posts are being featured this week 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: I still don’t know how the subject…
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The Mourning Kittel: When Grief Consumes All
In Genesis, when Jacob sees Joseph’s coat covered in blood, and thinks that his precious son is dead, he tears his clothes and begins to mourn. The act of tearing, keriah, is encoded in Jewish law as part of the ritual of mourning —whether expressing personal grief for a loved one or a national grief…
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Finding Vibrant Remnants of Jewish Life
When photographer Joshua Cogan traveled to Cochin, India, and northern Ethiopia in search of lost Jewish communities, he was not interested in approaching his subjects as symbols of decay and decline. “Every six months you’ll find articles that say, this is the last minyan, or this is the last Shabbos; but it’s never the last,…
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Bronzing Memory of Harvey Pekar
Classical statuary dots Cleveland’s husky urban landscape. But there’s no tribute to “the ancient Jewish god of frumpy people,” as Joyce Brabner puts it. Now, the Cleveland writer and artist wants to change that. She recently launched a much-publicized Kickstarter campaign to fund a memorial to her late husband, comics pioneer Harvey Pekar. Rather than…
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Toledot—These Are the Generations
Genesis 25:19–28:9 Jacob: A Simple Man? The fact is that our father Jacob was a liar in his youth. It’s also true that by the end of the story, he is the most upright patriarch of them all. As opposed to Abraham and Isaac, he never told anyone that his wife was his sister. He…
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Books A Grandmother’s Secrets
Anna Solomon’s debut novel, “The Little Bride,” is now available. Her posts are being featured this week 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: I’ve been thinking about my grandmother recently. This is my paternal grandmother, the…
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L’Chaim a Bad Grammatical Error?
Marvin Kastenbaum has a question inspired by my column of October 21, which dealt with the practice, common among American Jews, of saying “l’Shana tova,” “For a good year,” instead of simply “Shana tova,” “A good year,” at Rosh Hashanah time. The column pointed out that l’shana tova is a shortening of l’shana tova tikateyvu,…
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Jerusalem’s Three Unauthorized Portraits
Jerusalem: The Biography By Simon Sebag Montefiore Knopf, 688 pages, $35 Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World By James Carroll Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 432 pages, $28 Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem By Carol Delaney Free Press, 336 pages, $26 A Google search for Jerusalem brings more than 13,000 news hits…
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The Man Who Out-Sainted Einstein
James Franck, a Jewish scientist who was born in Hamburg, Germany, and was a co-winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in physics, is honored by The University of Chicago’s James Franck Institute and by the James Franck German-Israel Binational Program, hosted at five leading Israeli technical schools. Yet nothing commemorates the work Franck did inside…
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