A Jewish Valentine? Bring on the heartbreak
| 7:00 AM Aug 5, 2009
Today is Tu B’Av, sometimes referred to as the Jewish Valentine’s Day. It marks the beginning of the grape harvest during the Second Temple period, when Canaan’s amorous Jews celebrated Tu B’Av by letting their unmarried daughters dress in white and dance in the fields by the moonlight. “What they were saying,” the Mishna tells ...
How Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller tapped into the soul of '50s America—and made it sing
| 7:00 AM Jul 2, 2009
It was the early 1950’s and America was changing. Who would serve as the vanguard of this change? You would need people eager to embrace the new, able to serve as intermediaries linking black and white, high and low, sensitive enough to hear joy where others heard only squalor, clever enough to hear opportunity where others only heard noise, alive to the mordant humor of the ghetto, heedless of existing prejudices and conventions, enterprising enough to invent an industry where none had existed before. You needed people who could operate at the bloody crossroads where commerce, art, and social change were converging. All of which is to say that you needed Jews.
Though weak with hunger, Salo takes a stand
Freshly thawed, the rabbi is greeted with some reality TV
After a severe summer storm, Bernie hears some knocking
On the eve of the Oscars, an endorsement of ‘The White Ribbon’
A new documentary discusses the legacy of a Nazi filmmaker with his heirs
The anti-‘Edge of Darkness’ email your relatives are forwarding
There are more similarities between Jewish music and Jewish food than meets the ear
At 86, blind and housebound, Fugs frontman Tuli Kupferberg is still dispensing crass words of wisdom
Two bands cultivate the ‘Afro-Judaic’ aesthetic
Making the web’s greatest Hanukkah film
The Fox cult hit ‘Glee’ is about outcasts and Broadway—so naturally it offers a Jewish storyline
Wallace Shawn on being Jewish—onscreen and off
At 50, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom synagogue still glimmers—leaks and all
While trying on new artistic hat, artist develops series of paper coats
A new exhibition explores the overlapping worlds of Christian and Jewish art in medieval Spain
How Russian-Jewish émigrés are changing the face of competitive ballroom dance
How a latter-day vaudevillian from Kansas City got himself to speak perfect Yiddish
As it progressed, the playwright’s autobiographical trilogy grew more dark—and more true
