Stories about how we look at Jewish artists and how Jewish artists look at the world.
Forward with the Arts
The Latest
-
Culture Photo collection captures Hasidic life round the world
Read this article in Yiddish The Polish photographer Agnieszka Traczewska has just published a second collection of photographs of Hasidic Jewish life, entitled “A Rekindled World.” In this new album she presents scenes of daily life among ultra-Orthodox Jews in America, Israel, Canada, England, Belgium and Brazil. Her previous collection, “The Returns,” centered on images…
-
Culture How one dance lover is preserving the Jewish history of ballet — one blog entry at a time
Beatrice Waterhouse happened to go to a college that had a notable dance program. She hadn’t taken a ballet class since her early teens, but she figured she’d take a course on the history of dance. It sounded cool — plus, she needed the elective. “It turned out to be a history of basically ethnic…
-
News A remarkable photo exhibit captures ‘a joyful moment’ of Black-Jewish unity in Miami Beach
On fabled Miami Beach, land of sunshine and escape, Blacks and Jews share a shameful history of discrimination and exclusion. Into the 1970s, Blacks were prohibited by racist “sundown” laws from swimming or spending the night on the Beach, or to be there without a work ID. Jews could not buy or rent property on…
-
Culture Despite war and political unrest, at the Mediterranean Biennale, the art must go on
The fourth Mediterranean Biennale presents works by 60 international artists in public spaces across Haifa and Sakhnin Valley. The exhibition joins art world superstars, rising stars and emerging voices from countries that are rarely seen in Israeli museums and galleries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and Bahrain. In response to the pandemic, curators Avital Bar Shay…
-
Culture For the grandfather of micro-drawing, it’s truly a small world after all
The pandemic seems to have changed the world so that it now looks a lot more like the one artist Jacob El Hanani has always lived in. The 74-year-old Moroccan-born, Israeli-raised, New York-steeped “grandfather of micro-drawing,” has been tending to his intricate and painstakingly drawn canvases for over 45 years, in the same Soho loft…
-
Culture Don’t reduce Louise Bourgeois’s art to an Oedipus complex
Louise Bourgeois did not trust words; this is what numerous articles and essays about the artist will tell you. That fact is also mentioned at “Louise Bourgeois: Freud’s Daughter,” a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum, which shows more than 50 of the French-born artist’s works alongside pages and pages of musings and notes she…
-
Culture How a Holocaust survivor thrived in an art world that didn’t want her
Against all odds, Mila Gokhman has made a life full of flowers. “The main things in my life are flowers and trees,” the artist, 87, said in an interview. She was speaking from Los Angeles, where she lives today. But we were talking about an artistic journey that took place in another country entirely. Born…
-
Culture Babi Yar is a site of Jewish death. With a new synagogue, this architect vows to ‘bring back Jewish life’
On the haunted ground of Babi Yar, the walls of a synagogue are opening and closing like the pages of a pop-up book. Over the course of two nights in 1941, SS officers and their local Ukrainian allies murdered almost 34,000 Jews at this ancient ravine, perpetrating one of the largest and most infamous massacres…
Most Popular
- 1
News Dutch Jews grapple with ‘weaponization’ of their fear following attack on Israelis
- 2
News What a Secretary of State Marco Rubio would mean for American Jews and Israel
- 3
Fast Forward Trump AG nominee Matt Gaetz has left a trail of antisemitic comments
- 4
Opinion Trump’s first picks are die-hard Israel supporters, mocking the pro-Palestinian protest vote
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Will Trump’s efforts to fight antisemitism help degrade democracy?
-
Culture A Jewish snowman movie would have made a lot more sense than Netflix’s ‘Hot Frosty’
-
Fast Forward Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat, launches bid for New Jersey governor
-
Fast Forward Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary nominee, has multiple Christian and Crusades-inspired tattoos
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism