Forward.com

The Playless Play’s the ThingDan Fishback — a 27-year-old performance artist, musician, and recent winner of a significant grant — isn’t surprised when Jews reject him. After all, he is unabashedly gay, resolutely Jewish, strongly critical of Israeli policies and firmly against the Iraq War. His work presses a lot of buttons.…Read more

Marvel’s MavensThe history of comics has been big recently, and there’ve been a number of books and articles about it. Because so many Jews were there at the creation of both the comic book and the great superheroes who served as the main attraction, you have to ask the obvious question: What, if anything, does it mean that the industry was so heavily populated by Jews?…Read more

O, Landsman, Where Art Thou?First there was bluegrass, then there was newgrass and now, perhaps inevitably, there is Jewgrass. It’s not yet a trend. Call it a development. You can find it in New York, Denver and suburban Washington, D.C. It’s still rare enough to sound like a high-concept gag — Jed Clampett in a tallis — but it’s not.…Read more

Cartoons Counter Swastika ShockNot everyone would look at Scotch Tape and think of snails, but Sam Gross did and came up with the most popular cartoon in his 50-year career. One snail looks at another and says, “I don’t care if she’s a tape dispenser. I love her.” It’s a high concept sight gag and it’s all in the shapes — the dispenser and the snails look uncannily alike.…Read more

A History of Us: ‘The Jewish Americans’ Hits the High NotesAbout halfway through the first installment of David Grubin’s three-part documentary “The Jewish Americans,” a voice-over reads an 1862 letter from a northern Jewish officer, one Marcus Spiegel. In it, Spiegel explains to his wife why it is that he is willing to fight, perhaps die, for the Union. The letter is loaded with pathos, because Spiegel was subsequently killed in an ambush in Louisiana. This short sequence is an obvious echo of one of the most famous moments in one of the most famous PBS documentaries, Ken Burns’s “The Civil War.” There, over a painfully haunting fiddle tune we hear a similarly haunting letter from another union soldier this one destined to die at Bull Run. Grubin’s nod to Burns expresses, in miniature, the central message of “The Jewish Americans”: We Jews have been here from the start. We have loved America as much as anyone. In the face of discrimination, we have prevailed.…Read more