The Forward presents a special package of stories about Chicago.
Our First City
The Latest
-
Culture What It Means To Grow Up Jewish in Chicago
Growing up Jewish in Chicago means you’re perversely proud of the fact that you didn’t grow up in New York. Growing up Jewish in Chicago means you actually grew up in Chicago — not in Skokie, Evanston, Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove or any of the other suburbs where Jews started to flee when real estate…
-
Culture That time I painted Saul Bellow
There is that moment, when you’ve said or done something that possibly you will regret, but can’t be certain. Such were the seconds which followed the thin metallic thump of my envelope addressed to Saul Bellow as it briefly slid and fell to the bottom of my neighborhood mailbox. Years of musing about this letter…
-
Culture Why the World Still Needs Saul Bellow
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune By Zachary Leader Knopf, 832 pages, $40 ‘Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed. By “man,” of course, he meant mensch. Zachary Leader, Bellow’s new biographer, answers Bellow’s dying question: “Both.” Bellow was a jerk: Famously prickly and…
-
Culture Keeping a Close Watch on the Zombie Wars of Chicago
The Making of Zombie Wars By Aleksandar Hemon Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel “The Making of Zombie Wars” is preceded by two epigraphs. The first, attributed to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, reads, “The mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body endures.” The second…
-
Culture Of World’s Fairs, Cellphones and 10 Other Facts About Jewish Illinois
1) 297,885 Jews live in Illinois. 2) The first recorded Jewish resident in Illinois was John Hays who lived in Cahokia, near the Missouri border. He was a farmer, trader, and soldier, and served as St. Clair County’s postmaster until 1798, when he was appointed sheriff. 3) Music entrepreneur Sol Bloom developed the Midway Plaisance,…
-
Culture Revisiting the Jewish Crime of the Century
Compulsion By Meyer Levin Fig Tree Books, 480 pages, $15.95 Why, in 2015, should we be interested in a novel that was written 60 years ago? Moreover, why are we interested in a crime that was committed 90 years ago? When I was growing up in New York in the 1950s, there was no one…
-
Art Meet Chicago’s $500 Million Art Man
“Natürlich.” When asked if he collected things as a child, Stefan Edlis replied in impeccable German. Of course he did. “I was a stamp collector,” said Edlis, 89, industrialist and art collector, who recently donated over 40 works of art to the Art Institute of Chicago together with his wife, Gael Neeson, making it the…
-
Art Holocaust Survivor Donates Art Worth $500M to Chicago Museum
The largest art gift in the history of the Art Institute of Chicago has been donated to the museum by Stefan Edlis, a Vienna-born Jewish industrialist and art collector, and his wife Gael Neeson. The over 40 works from Edlis’ collection of Pop and contemporary art that will go to the museum include nine silkscreens…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Why neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
- 2
Opinion The group behind Project 2025 has a plan to protect Jews. It will do the opposite.
- 3
Opinion Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
- 4
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
-
Fast Forward Three arrested in murder of rabbi in United Arab Emirates; Israel denounces ‘despicable antisemitic act’
-
News Trump promised peace in the Middle East. Will his 2020 plan be the blueprint?
-
Fast Forward Rep. Ritchie Torres, outspoken pro-Israel advocate, is dropping hints that he could run for NY governor
-
Fast Forward Ursula Haverbeck, infamous German Holocaust denier known as ‘Nazi grandma,’ dies at 96
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
