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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Books Natalie Portman’s Dad Penned a Pregnancy Novel
Is publishing a book easier if your daughter’s an Oscar winner? Natalie Portman’s dad is about to find out. Avner Hershlag, the Israeli father of the “Black Swan” star, is currently peddling his debut novel to major publishing houses, the Observer reports. Partly inspired by his work as a fertility specialist, the book is described…
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This is Not a Holocaust Book
Yes, that is correct. The sign on the big shelf in one of the largest bookstores in Warsaw says “Jewish books.” The books — fiction, nonfiction, academic, guides to Judaism and contemporary Jewish life (including a translation of Shmuley Boteach’s “Kosher Sex”) — are all in Polish. Such shelves can be seen in every big…
The Latest
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April 15, 2011
100 Years Ago in The Forward “When you hear that the bosses of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory have been arrested,” a Forward editorial reads, “the first thing you feel is relief. Finally — all is not lost with the world. The heavy stone of pain that lies on our hearts from the bloody mass murder…
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Books The Origin of Russian for Lovers
Marina Biltshteyn is the author of the new poetry chapbook “Russian for Lovers.” Her 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: It was my first semester in the MFA program…
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‘Why Is Your Haggadah Different From Others?’
Reporting on the new Haggadot of the year is among my favorite roles here at the Forward. Each year, a new trove appears. And each year, we learn something new about the American Jewish experience. It’s no surprise, then, that the most exciting new Haggadah of the year isn’t a book at all, but an…
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Dalí and the Jews
At the thought of Salvador Dalí, many people envision the artist’s famously eccentric face — his wide, cartoonish eyes and the wiry mustache that seemed to defy gravity. Or perhaps his best-known canvas springs to mind, that all-too-familiar scene of watches melting in a barren landscape. According to a rising crop of scholars, however, there…
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The Passover Cleaning Season Is Upon Us
You know Passover is around the corner when a) you’ve finally finished the last of the chocolate-filled wafers from Purim mishloach manot and b) your friends start kvetching — on Facebook and in person — about the cleaning they have to do. I despise cleaning, and my cleaning lady of several years quit last week…
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Books A.B. Yehoshua Speaks His Mind at the New York Public Library
A.B. Yehoshua’s new novel was inspired by a painting of a woman breast-feeding her father. The 74-year-old literary luminary, who has published some 15 books, does not retreat from the provocative or the perverse. Yehoshua calls “Spanish Charity” a probing of the creative process, and Haaretz saw it as a retrospective of the author’s own…
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Out of the Shadow of Pollock, Lee Krasner Defies the World
Lee Krasner: A Biography By Gail Levin William Morrow, 560 pages, $30 In 1956, the artist Jackson Pollock was killed in a car crash in Springs, on the South Fork of Long Island. He was 44 years old and drunk when he drove his Oldsmobile convertible into a tree one fateful August night. He died…
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The Divine Firsts
Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible’s Intriguing Firsts By Meir Shalev, translated by Stuart Schoffman Doubleday Religion, 304 pages, $25 Israeli scholar and poet Zali Gurevitch once asked a room full of kibbutz parents a question he admitted was impossible to answer: If their children were allowed to study only one subject, what would it be?…
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Bloodsuckers, Serbs and Ghostly Kabbalists
Leeches By David Albahari, Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $24 In assessing the work of Serbian-Jewish writer David Albahari, any English-language reader would be working with half a deck. Albahari, who writes in Serbian but has lived in Canada since 1994, has published more than 20 books, including novels, short-story collections,…
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