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…
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically…
For young people in the tight-knit Orthodox community, being gay can feel extremely isolating. But ever since Mordechai Levovitz co-founded Jewish Queer Youth, a support network for queer Orthodox Jews under 30, there’s been a community ready to accept each other with open arms. He recently visited our podcast studio to discuss coming out to…
Mark Cohen, editor of “Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim,” explains why Krim has been neglected as a Beat, a writer and a Jew. The Forward’s Arts & Culture editor Dan Friedman talks with Cohen about his forthcoming work on the parody songwriter Allan Sherman, an essay about which is slated…
Princeton University’s Mark R. Cohen, the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, spoke recently with the Forward’s news editor Larry Cohler-Esses about the history of Muslim anti-Semitism. They discuss the debate over whether Islam is innately unfriendly to Jews, or whether Muslim anti-Semitism is a newer phenomenon imported from Christianity…
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