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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Bound for Social Contention
Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative By Yael S. Feldman Stanford University Press, 440 pages, $60 ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So said William Faulkner in his “Requiem for a Nun.” If proof of this statement is needed, the history of Israel — where events thousands of years old…
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You Don’t Know Zubi!
Zubi!: The Real Hebrew You Were Never Taught in School By Danny Ben Israel, illustrated by Chris Murphy Plume, 160 pages, $13 Israelis barely speak Hebrew. The language on the streets, in cafes and along the beaches is a hybrid of adapted and adopted expressions mined from Arabic, English, Russian, Yiddish and dozens of dialects….
The Latest
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How To Understand Yeshivish
Browsing on the Internet while working on last week’s column, which had to do with a blessing in the morning prayer, I came across the following: “The lechatchila time for shacharis is neitz. B’dieved, if a person davened from amud hashachar and onwards he is yotzei. In a shas hadchak he may daven from amud…
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As a Woman, Being Reborn
Coming To Life By Joy Ladin Sheep Meadow Press, 102 pages, $15.95 Medieval kabbalists wrote obsessively about language powers that brought the world into existence. Joy — previously known as Jay — Ladin is a contemporary poet whose words are also creating a world. In her case, though, the world in question is Joy’s own:…
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March 04, 2011
100 Years Ago in the Forward Baron Richard von Arkovy, thought to be a well-heeled Hungarian aristocrat, was arrested at the posh Plaza Hotel on charges that he stole platinum vessels from the Cuban vice consul in New York, Julio S. Jarron. Although the baron reacted badly to his arrest at the hotel, causing somewhat…
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Books Jewish Children’s Ephemera Where You Least Expect Them
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Princeton’s Cotsen Children’s Library is justly celebrated for the range of its holdings, the imaginative reach of its curators and its stimulating conferences, like the one I had the good fortune to attend just the other day, which explored the ephemera — the stuff — of childhood. From its…
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Books ‘Obama’s Secrets’ at the Jerusalem Book Fair
Crossposted from Haaretz The Jerusalem Book Fair may be the only place where you can get from Russia to India via Angola. With a maze of stands representing publishers both local and foreign (this is Angola’s first showing at the biennial convention) you’ll need a GPS to find your way around, or at least a…
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Françoise Giroud, Her Triumphant Career and Personal Torments
To many, Françoise Giroud, born Lea France Gourdji in September 1916 to Turkish-Jewish parents, was an example of a woman who handled power with uncommon grace. Giroud, who died in January 2003 at age 86, served as France’s minister of culture. In 1953, she co-founded the influential political weekly L’Express to advance the agenda of…
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Books This Storm Is What We Call Progress
Earlier this week, Michael David Lukas shared a list of his top ten favorite Jews of all time and his connection to Nomi Stone. 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,…
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Books Israel and Germany Collaborate on Online Archive
Crossposted from Haaretz Soon you’ll be able to read the personal archives of Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem online. Hundreds of medieval manuscripts, scores of personal archives and many other materials retained at the National Library in Jerusalem will be digitized, as part of a joint project by the Israeli and German governments. The materials…
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Out of Step, and Out of This World
Journal of a UFO Investigator By David Halperin Viking, 294 pages, $25.95 “I sat swaying over the book, poring over its words. I could make out nearly all that the Gypsies had written if I stuck with it long enough. The meaning was something else again. But that’s the way of a scripture: it’s often…
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