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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All Quiet on Eastern Front
Virginia Gross Levin writes from Broomall, Pa.: “Are you familiar with a Yiddish expression greynetz mentshn “border people”? My great uncle used it to describe our family’s secretive nature. In the 50 years since then, I have never heard it from anyone else. I understand that people on the border had to learn to hold…
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I Am Woman, Hear Me Sing
A better answer might have dismissed the rabbinic exegesis that led to the prohibition, in favor of the simple verse itself: “Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet and your face is beautiful.” In the past year, those sweet voices seem to have multiplied, producing a soundscape full of strikingly talented Jewish…
The Latest
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Books Let There Be Kvetch!
Ken Krimstein is the author of “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons.” 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: Ken Krimstein’s new book “Kvetch As Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons,”…
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Lies and Provocation
A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction By Ruth Franklin Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $29.95 Theodor Adorno famously declared that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” — and indeed impossible. Ruth Franklin, in her thoughtful work of literary history and analysis, “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction,”…
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Alan Dershowitz Rewrites the Future
The Trials of Zion By Alan M. Dershowitz Grand Central Publishing, 352 pages, $26.99 Alan Dershowitz dedicates “The Trials of Zion” to the memory of his mother, who, he tells us, “always encouraged and defended me. She would have liked this book.” A reader would have to possess a heart of stone not to appreciate…
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December 24, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward There’s nothing sadder than a Jewish kid at Christmas. It’s even more difficult in America, where the barriers between Jews and others are not as big. But there is a cure for what ails the Jewish child. It’s Hanukkah! Does this holiday not fall around the same time as…
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Not Just a Friend of Gauguin
Despite my voraciously Jewish eye, checking out museums in France’s Brittany for interesting exhibitions wasn’t likely to yield anything of Jewish Interest. “Brittany and Jews” seemed a stretch — maybe like “the elephant and the Jewish problem.” What I knew of art in Brittany was exemplified in the hard-bitten sensibility of the three unidentified women…
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What? Is There Something in the Water?
Henry Lerner writes from Edison, N.J.: “I was recently struck by the following, which I find perplexing. It seems that in many languages, the word for ‘water’ contains in it the word for ‘what.’ Besides English ‘water’ and ‘what,’ for example, we have German wasser and was, Latin aqua and qua, Hebrew mayim and ma,…
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The Man Who Saved New York
DEALINGS By Felix Rohatyn Simon & Schuster, $27.00, 304 pages His life is, in some ways, a classic tale of a Jewish boy making good. In 1940, at the age of 12, Felix Rohatyn escaped Nazi-occupied France with gold coins hidden in toothpaste tubes. After migrating to the U.S., Rohatyn earned a physics degree and…
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A Surreal-ist and a Journal-ist
Adonis: Selected Poems Translated by Khaled Mattawa Yale University Press, part of the Margellos World Republic of Letters, 432 pages, $30 Journal of an Ordinary Grief By Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi Archipelago Books, 175 pages, $16 Though their styles are distinct, poets Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish are two of the Arab world’s modern…
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Love Poetry in the Time of Conflict
War & Love / Love & War By Aharon Shabtai Translated by Peter Cole New Directions Books, 175 pages, $15.95 “Keats called it negative capability. I call it a capacity for sustenance — to sustain and be sustained, which is to say, to continue. And to continue means to always make and say something different.”…
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