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 Most Famous English Jew
“Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero,” was recently nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. A version of this article originally appeared in Yiddish here. Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero By Abigail Green Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 560 pages, $35.00 Was Sir Moses Haim Montefiore the first Jewish celebrity of…
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Uniting Gay and Straight at School
When ninth-grader Shulamit Izen fought to establish a group uniting gay and straight students at her Boston-area Jewish high school in 2001, the effort seemed remarkable enough to inspire a film. “Hineini,” the 2005 documentary chronicling the young lesbian’s struggle, became a touchstone for a nascent movement encouraging openness and support for teenagers grappling with…
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Books ‘Scribbling Women’ Get Less Respect, More Pay
Female novelists might not be getting the respect they deserve, but they sure can get rich trying. This, in short, is novelist (and, disclaimer, my friend) Teddy Wayne’s response to Jennifer Weiner’s recent post about the New York Times’ persistent bias towards male novelists — an issue that The Sisterhood has been following. Weiner found…
The Latest
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An ‘Oyster’ in Ohio
In the dazzling circus world of “Oyster,” Noga Harmelin dances the role of a tiny, acrobatic doll. With her delicate face painted white beneath a wig of unruly blond hair, she is a whimsical and tragic clown. She jumps, she gesticulates and she even floats (with the help of a harness) high into the air,…
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We Are Not All Alike
Avrum Burg draws a number of distinctions in his analysis of parashat Bo. The core of his argument is that “Every struggle for freedom is a struggle to seize the mastery of time” and coordinate with this, and that “command of time is the essence of freedom.” A subsidiary argument contrasts in a similarly binary…
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Looking Back: February 3, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward A gang of suspected horse poisoners is believed to be behind the recent murder of blacksmith Louis Blumenthal, who worked at Lower Manhattan’s Witkin’s Stables, located at Division and Ludlow streets. With several horses dead, the police are sure that there are witnesses, but it is obvious that they…
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Seeing Both Sides of the Holy Land
A group drives up to the Mount of Olives and takes in the vista below: the Old City of Jerusalem; the Dome of the Rock in the near distance; the modern city a bit farther off. An Israeli tour guide begins to explain the importance of this spot to the Jewish people. “King David,” he…
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Day Schools See Future With Non-Jews
Before sending her 6-year-old son, Charlie, off to day school in September, Brenda Hite wondered if she’d made the right decision. Neither Hite nor her husband, Tom, are Jewish, but the public school options in their hometown of Akron, Ohio, didn’t enthrall them. So they applied to the local Lippman School, which impressed the Hites…
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Bringing ‘Darkness’ To Light
American audiences have become dulled by the depiction of the Holocaust in Hollywood movies that are increasingly celebrity filled and philosophically bland. But viewers familiar with Agnieszka Holland’s spellbinding and justly acclaimed “Europa Europa,” and her less well-known Oscar nominee, “Angry Harvest,” know that her portrayals of characters and their relationships to each other during…
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Raising a Glass to America
Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition By Marni Davis NYU Press, 272 pages, $32 Sociologist Nathan Glazer has written that “a people’s relation to alcohol represents something very deep about it.” That this statement rings especially true for Jews is the premise of University of Georgia professor Marni Davis’s new book,…
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The Folly of Yearning for Broadway
Broadway Baby By Alan Shapiro Algonquin Books, 272 Pages, $13.95 In his debut novel, “Broadway Baby,” Alan Shapiro, the author of nine volumes of poetry, gives the much-maligned 1950s-era Jewish Mother a chance to tell her story. It seems in the 50 years since the appearance of Philip Roth’s comic and overbearing archetype, the male…
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