Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
The Latest
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News In Brooklyn’s hipster Williamsburg neighborhood, Hasidic Jews are the real counterculture
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood is known as a center of gentrification and a gathering place for the cool young hipsters of New York City. A short walk from the Lower East Side over the Williamsburg Bridge, it’s also home to one of the most concentrated Hasidic Jewish communities in…
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Yiddish World Feeling at home in my Yiddish-speaking bubble
The ten students in my Yiddish class are of differing political persuasions but we're united in our love of the language.
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Culture This nonagenarian knows more about the cellphone than you — because he invented it
After working from home for over a year, I still have no idea how Zoom backgrounds work, which means the various strangers I interview can look past me to see my ailing succulents, unopened prestige cookbooks and a childhood’s worth of participation trophies. Unlike me, a supposed “digital native,” Martin Cooper is old enough that…
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Culture Why do we keep turning Holocaust survivor stories into self-help books?
On a recent segment of “The Today Show,” a cadre of well-coiffed hosts discussed the life of Eddie Jaku, a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor and the author of “The Happiest Man on Earth,” a memoir about his imprisonment in Auschwitz. Grainy photos of concentration camp prisoners alternated with clips from an interview with Jaku and videos…
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Culture Her name is Ozick, look on her works, ye mighty, and despair
Antiquities By Cynthia Ozick Knopf, 192 pages, $21.00 Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” proposes a remarkable idea: That after death, we get to re-experience a single day from our lives — just one perfectly ordinary day. It’s a painful, startling scenario, a striking conclusion to a complicated existence. “I can’t look at everything hard…
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Culture How Jewish New York got its very un-Jewish names
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro asked me to meet him on Frieda Zames Way, which is not an easy place to find on Google Maps. No street view photos, no subway wait times — nothing to feed our iPhone-era inclination to know exactly where we’re going, all the time. As any serious investigative journalist would, I immediately turned…
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Culture Norton pulls Philip Roth biography from print after author accused of sexual assault
The publisher W.W. Norton has pulled its recently-released biography of Philip Roth from print after multiple women accused its author, Blake Bailey, of sexual assault. The Associated Press reported that Norton would stop printing of “Philip Roth: The Biography,” a much hyped, 912-page treatise on the author’s life, as well as Bailey’s 2014 memoir “The…
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Culture They couldn’t find any books on Ashkenazi herbs — so they wrote one
Deatra Cohen was studying to become an herbalist when her teacher assigned what seemed like a straightforward task: researching and reporting on the herbal cures and practices of her own culture. But the project was anything but simple. A retired librarian, Cohen was adept at navigating databases and combing through archives. But she could find…
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Most Popular
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Fast Forward Why neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
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Opinion The group behind Project 2025 has a plan to protect Jews. It will do the opposite.
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Opinion Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
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News Texas schools want to add Queen Esther to the curriculum. Here’s why Jews (and many Christians) are opposed.
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward Three arrested in murder of rabbi in United Arab Emirates; Israel denounces ‘despicable antisemitic act’
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News Trump promised peace in the Middle East. Will his 2020 plan be the blueprint?
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Fast Forward Rep. Ritchie Torres, outspoken pro-Israel advocate, is dropping hints that he could run for NY governor
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Fast Forward Ursula Haverbeck, infamous German Holocaust denier known as ‘Nazi grandma,’ dies at 96
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