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 Composing Identity, From Jamaica to England
This year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist featured two authors who write about groups not often represented in British literature. Howard Jacobson, author of “The Finkler Question,” has made a career crafting a literary image of the English Jew, while Andrea Levy, shortlisted for “The Long Song,” has documented the black British experience in her five…
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Books Is Yiddish Literature the Next Big Thing?
The Brothers Ashkenazi By I.J. Singer, translated by Joseph Singer Other Press, 432 pages, $16.95 The Magician of Lublin By Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $15 The Glatstein Chronicles By Jacob Glatstein Edited and introduced by Ruth R. Wisse, translated by Maier Deshell and Norbert Guterman Yale University Press, 432 pages,…
The Latest
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Don’t Trust Your Gut
One of the functions of religion, we are told, is to provide comfort in an uncomfortable world. We all know we will die, but religion comforts us with tales of the afterlife. We all know that life is unpredictable, but religion comforts us with stories of a guiding light, ordering the universe. In this way,…
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Books The Pit of Tel Aviv, A Preliminary Damage Report
Avi Steinberg’s first book, “Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian,” is now available. 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: I was on a roll…
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My Days With Dylan
On Sunday December 5, the event “Bob Dylan and the Band: What Kind of Love is This?” sponsored by the Forward, celebrates one of rock and roll’s most powerful collaborations. A symposium at the 14th St Y — where an exhibition of Dylan memorabilia and photographs by William G. Scheele (a road manager for The…
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Writer and Actress Diane Flacks on How ‘It Gets Better’
Diane Flacks, a Jewish actress and writer, appears in the “It Gets Better Canada,” the country’s LGBT community’s artistic contribution to the anti-bullying campaign. Flacks can be seen in the popular, 12-minute video saying, “In my son’s class, a lot of the kids say, ‘I have two moms!’ and they don’t. But they wish they…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: Conclusion
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite has partnered with the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA) and the Jewish Book Council to present “30 Days, 30 Texts,” a series of reflections by community leaders on the books that influenced their Jewish journeys. Today, Jewish Book Council director Carolyn Starman Hessel concludes…
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Books Pen Pals Reunited: Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt
The friendship between the great kabbalist Gershom Scholem and the political scientist Hannah Arendt famously foundered in the 1960s after a disagreement over Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” an account, of the trial of the Nazi war criminal. Scholem reproached Arendt for a lack of “ahavath Yisrael,” to which Arendt readily concurred that she lacked “ahavath”…
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Richler’s Version
‘Barney’s Version” is a film a decade in the making. The unusually long development and production schedule wasn’t the result of the filmmaker fine-tuning digital-effects shots or the studio slowly unfurling some bloated marketing campaign, as is often the case. Rather, it was a matter of producer Robert Lantos ensuring that everything about “Barney’s Version,”…
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Blackened by Filthy Lucre
Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype By Abraham H. Foxman Palgrave/Macmillan. 256 pages, $26 Capitalism and the Jews By Jerry Z. Muller Princeton University Press. 272 pages, $24.95 The nexus of Jews, capitalism and money became an unholy one early on. One side of this coin is the classic anti-Semitic myth of “Jewish…
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A Worm in the Machine
Irwin Rosenthal writes: “The November 18th New York Times carried an article entitled ‘Worm Was Perfect for Sabotaging Centrifuges.’ In it appeared the sentence: ‘Ralph Langner, a German expert in industrial control systems who has examined the [computer] program [in question] and who was the first to suggest that the worm may have been aimed…
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