Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture. Here, you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music, film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of everything and everyone from The Rolling Stones to…
Culture
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I have seen the future of America — in a pastrami sandwich in Queens
San Wei, which serves pastrami sandwiches along with churros and biang biang noodles, represents an immigrant's fulfillment of the American dream
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Jerusalem: Easter, Passover
Poet Stanley Moss, who talked to the Forward about poetic and religious practice, reads the following poem, which he wrote, at his Passover meals. 1 The first days of April in the fields — a congregation of nameless green, those with delicate faces have come and the thorn and thistle, trees in purple bloom, some…
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April 22, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward The Jews of Manhattan’s Lower East Side were shocked to discover that Christian missionaries who have posted themselves in the neighborhood in order to “save” Jewish souls have been converting local children without their parents’ knowledge. The main location for these conversions is on Second Avenue between Houston and…
The Latest
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Building the Perfect Beast
TWENTIETH CENTURY JEWS: FORGING IDENTITY IN THE LAND OF PROMISE AND IN THE PROMISED LAND By Monty Noam Penkower Academic Studies Press, 407 pages, $65 THE UNIVERSAL JEW: MASCULINITY, MODERNITY, AND THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT By Mikhal Dekel Northwestern University Press, 304 pages, $29.95 ‘Very few people know who I am,” Salvador Dalí is reputed to…
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She Got Moving Images Moving
The end of this year’s presentation of the Academy Awards marked the final wrap on the 30-year career of Rochelle Slovin, founding director of the Museum of the Moving Image. In an industry that immortalizes art, the museum defines Slovin’s legacy — bringing audiences behind the magic of the moving image. And now, with the…
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Questioning the Questions
Ruth Fath of Princeton, N.J., asks a timely question: “Does the Yiddish word kashe, as in the fir kashes, the ‘Four Questions’ asked at the beginning of the Seder, come from the same root as the Hebrew word kasheh, ‘difficult’? Our rabbi points out that in Hebrew the Four Questions are known as arba ha-kushyot,…
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Books Patricide, Photography, and Audrey Hepburn
On Monday, Austin Ratner wrote about Hillel sandwiches. His first book, “The Jump Artist,” is the winner of the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on…
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The Four ‘Sons’ as Characters From ‘Glee’
On a Tuesday night in April, millions of people will gather together for the tale of four Jewish children, each of whom embodies contemporary Jewish consciousness in a different way. The evening is filled with song, multiple narratives and insights into Jewish identity. I’m talking, of course, about the award-winning Fox television series “Glee.” For…
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Jewcology: A Clearinghouse for Jewish Environmental Awareness
The website Jewcology.com launched late last year with guns blazing. A statement from 135 alt-Jewish heavyweights, from foundation executives to academics, supported its creation. A $50,000 grant from the Jerusalem-based ROI Community of Young Jewish Innovators funded its development. The global press trumpeted its debut. But the site, which calls itself a “transformational Web portal…
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Books Back in the Old Courtyard
Between 1929 and 1935, Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) published a comic novel called “The Zelmenyaners” serially in the Minsk-based Yiddish language monthly Shtern.The novel told the story of a family courtyard in Minsk, in Soviet Belorussia, which was being progressively transformed through aggressive Soviet modernization. As I will explain in an April 13 lecture…
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Books Hebrew for the Internet Age
Crossposted from Haaretz “Writing on the Internet is like breathing or walking,” says Dr. Carmel Vaisman, who earned a Ph.D. from Hebrew University for her research on language, gender and play. “Hebrew Online” (Keter, in Hebrew), which Vaisman wrote with her colleague, Ilan Gonen, who is completing a thesis on the Aramaic of Kurdistan’s Jews,…
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Books As Jewish as a Hillel Sandwich
Austin Ratner‘s first book, “The Jump Artist,” is the winner of the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: When I learned…
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