Forward.com

In Big Easy, ‘White Boy’ Stern Makes Brass HistoryEven while fanning himself with two enormous ostrich feathers, Joe “White Boy” Stern, the small, milky-skinned man at the head of the jazz parade, sweated underneath his blue linen suit.…Read more

A Family Snapshot, in Black and WhiteOff-White: A Memoir By Laurie Gunst Soho Press, 288 pages, $25. * * * Rhoda Cobin Lloyd died in October 1986. Her funeral was a small, open-casket affair that ended with a eulogy by Laurie Gunst, Southern Jew and historian. The eulogy was short: All Gunst could say was that Lloyd’s parents, Sam and Julie, had been born as slaves and…Read more

Peres at NYU, Courtesy of MTVAdozen men wearing black suits and secret service earpieces loitered next to the front door of a New York University lecture hall. A pack of gum with Hebrew lettering on it lay on a desktop next to a camcorder stand.Clearly there was something out of the ordinary going on in Professor Caroleen Marji’s International Politics of the Middle…Read more

Female Athletes Give New Year Some MuscleThese are calendar girls you don’t want to mess with.In…Read more

Imagining Life as A Black Woman –– In the BibleIn a recent meeting with the Forward at the Hotel Plaza Athenee on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, French novelist Marek Halter sketched one stone tablet, then its twin. He fashioned an ark around them and announced, “The Ten Commandments came from Moses.” He paused, popped a wasabi pea in his mouth and set his napkin artwork…Read more