Welcome to the Forward’s insightful posts and articles covering all things Jewish, from culture and traditions to history, faith and contemporary Jewish life.
Welcome to the Forward’s insightful posts and articles covering all things Jewish, from culture and traditions to history, faith and contemporary Jewish life.
Some cookbook authors get their recipes from chefs. Hélène Jawhara Piñer got hers from the Inquisition. The coiled holiday breads, long-simmered stews, and honey-sweetened, orange-scented desserts collected within Piñer’s remarkable new book of Sephardic cookery derive not from family recipes passed down through well-worn cookbooks or hand-scribbled notes on food-stained scraps of paper, but from…
A group of University of Southern California faculty members are demanding the school take action against a Palestinian student who posted several antisemitic tweets, including one saying she wanted “to kill every motherf——-g Zionist.” In an open letter addressed to the university president, provost, and board chairman published Dec. 1, the faculty said a lack…
All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business By Mel Brooks Ballantine Books, 480 pages, $25 Mel Brooks’ memoir begins with a promise. In a preface, the 95-year-old actor-writer-director vows to make an intimate confession to his reader — one not to be shared with anyone. Then, he thinks a bit more about the…
While headlines focus on the Arizona’s questionable audits, its challenges to voting rights and its fur-clad QAnon shaman, insiders say if you want to understand the deeper shifts going on in the state’s politics, watch the Hernandez siblings. Arizona is no stranger to political dynasties – the Goldwaters, Udalls and McCains. But no one’s ever…
The first thing I did after finishing “Charm Circle” was clean my room. Named for a patch of Kew Garden Hills in Queens, NY, where red brick semidetached homes form a pseudo suburb, the documentary by Nira Burstein is as intimate — and dirty — as filmmaking gets. Burstein follows her parents, Uri and Raya,…
Do you know who little Keira Kagan was? I want to tell you about her. Keira had blonde-brown hair, cute little glasses and a beautiful smile. Her mother described her as “smart and spunky,” someone who “loved to get dressed up to get into her princess dress and be fancy.” She lived in Toronto and…
You know the headliner must be really important when her warm-up act is Sarah Silverman. “Without further ado, a Jew,” the comedian said as she introduced her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman. The Oct. 3 celebrity-studded event at the home of actors Bradley Whitford and Amy Landecker was a fundraiser for the rabbi’s organization, Second Nurture,…
Amid many gloomy predictions that American Jewry is shrinking, disengaging and assimilating, comes bracing news from Chicago: um, maybe not. A just-released Chicago Jewish population study — the largest one ever — found that the community is instead growing and diversifying: • The study shows that the Jewish population in Chicago is nearly 320,000, an…
100% of profits support our journalism
