Ivy L. Barsky is changing museums, cities and American Jewish culture. As deputy director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, located on Battery Place in Lower Manhattan, Barsky worked to convey the Jewish experience through the stories of survivors. Now, as she becomes the director and chief operating…
Photo by Dan Keinan. Courtesy of Maya Barkai. In Downtown Manhattan, an international city where pedestrians clog the sidewalks, photographer Maya Barkai’s “Walking Men” fits right in. At the same time, these 99 life-size representations of “walk” signals from around the globe definitely stand out. “Walking Men 99,” an art installation stretching 500 feet around…
Jane Eisner, editor of the Forward, and Devra Ferst, editor of the Forward’s food blog, The Jew and the Carrot, talk with Oran B. Hesterman about his new book “Fair Food,” which details how public policy can and should shape the ways we grow and consume food. <strong>Subscribe to Forward podcasts on iTunes</strong>
For Canadian author and poet Alison Pick, it was her personal journey of discovering and reclaiming her Jewish identity that led to her greatest professional success. The 35-year-old recently won the 2010 Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction, being presented May 30 in Toronto, for her historical novel, “Far to Go,” about a Czechoslovakian Jewish…
Photo by Ahron D. Weiner In 2004, photographer Ahron D. Weiner took his first trip to the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine. Before his death in 1810, Nachman is said to have promised that if his followers came to his grave on Rosh Hashanah, he would intercede on their behalf in…
On March 11, “Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” the first museum exhibition devoted to New York illustrator and author Maira Kalman, opens at the Jewish Museum. The show, which debuted in Philadelphia last summer and then traveled to the West Coast, gives Kalman’s fans a rare opportunity to see the original artwork behind her…
When we talk about the Enlightenment, or the Haskalah, in Europe, we have a general historical sense that all Jews were in ghettos and then the walls came down. One day pogroms, the next Einstein, Freud and Kafka. The period of time was indeed extraordinary, as Michael Goldfarb elucidates in his book “Emancipation: How Liberating…
In a new book, “The Jews of San Nicandro,” author John Davis, the chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut, sheds light on the little-known but highly curious tale of how a community of Italian Catholic peasants came to embrace Judaism during the rise of Fascism and the Second World War. Using…
אַ טייל פֿון די כינעזישע ליבהאָבער פֿון ייִדיש זאָגן, אַז מאַאָ צע טונג האָט ליב געהאַט שלום־עליכמען.
