Stories about how we look at Jewish artists and how Jewish artists look at the world.
Forward With the Arts
The Latest
-
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…
-
Culture Michelle Zauner’s new memoir will tell you how grief tastes
If you don’t think great human drama can play out in a supermarket, just read the first pages of Michelle Zauner’s new memoir, “Crying in H Mart.” The largest Asian supermarket chain in the United States, H Mart takes its first initial from the Korean phrase han ah reum, which means “one arm full of…
-
Culture This traditionally trained scribe is bending the rules — literally
Kalman Delmoor is a classically trained Hebrew scribe, or sofer, who sits in the Yochanan Ben Zakai historic synagogue, one of the Four Sephardi Synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem. But he doesn’t spend his days writing tefillin or mezuzot. Instead, he turns passages from Torah or liturgy into artwork — some colorful, some…
-
Culture Meet the real-life artist behind the paintings in ‘Shtisel’
Akiva Shtisel, the protagonist of the eponymous series, is a genius artist, and his gorgeous paintings lie at the heart of the show about Haredi life. In the most recent season, his paintings of his deceased wife hold much of the emotional weight of the show, symbolizing Akiva’s grief and his struggle to develop a…
-
Culture At the Jewish Museum, the midcentury feels very, very modern
I arrived at “Modern Look,” the Jewish Museum’s newest exhibit, ready for what it promised: a bird’s-eye view of midcentury magazine photography. But I was preoccupied, as I have been for weeks, with a very different media moment. The recent documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” which showed how exploitative coverage eroded the singer’s mental health, has…
-
Culture The artist who transfixed Albert Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre
As a teenager I would often mistake Alexander Calder’s work for that of Joan Miró and sometimes even Picasso. Bold, playful and abstract, the sculpture of these three art giants appeared interchangeable. Visits to Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona and Musée Picasso in Paris only seemed to confirm Calder’s European influences, even though the darker…
-
Culture Once a private investigator, now he preserves memories of Holocaust survivors
For Heshy Rubinstein, a Brooklyn photographer who has interviewed some 600 survivors over the past 15 years, Holocaust documentation is a family affair. The 62-year-old Borough Park resident and son of survivors from Hungary recalls how his son, Yossi, a curious child who voraciously read about the Holocaust, started interviewing his grandparents and several of…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Who was Horst Wessel, and why are people comparing Charlie Kirk to him?
- 2
Culture Charlie Kirk kept a ‘Jewish Sabbath.’ What did he mean by that?
- 3
Film & TV Robert Redford’s legacy is surprisingly Jewish
- 4
Antisemitism Decoded Israel is being blamed for Charlie Kirk’s death. Here’s what that conspiracy theory says about the far right’s divide
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion The terrifying Nazi precedent for Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — and the reasons to stay hopeful
-
Fast Forward Freed hostage Edan Alexander says he’s returning to the IDF next month
-
Yiddish World How a Yiddish acting troupe fooled the Tsarist government
-
Fast Forward After years of war, world’s oldest synagogue paintings are revealed as intact in Damascus
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
