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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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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Sovereign or Beast?
French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida, who was the dean of deconstruction and died in 2004 at age 74, still divides opinions dramatically. On October 26, Yale University Press issued in paperback David Mikics’s 2009 “Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography,” a concise study that does not fully answer the question in its title, but seeks…
The Latest
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A Quiet Man to Explosive Effect
The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the soviets the Atom Bomb By Allen M. Hornblum Yale University Press, 464 pages, $32.50 Assigned the code names “Goose” and “Arno,” Harry Gold, the son of Jewish immigrants from Kiev, served as a spy and courier for the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s until the end…
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The Revivalist
At the end of John Cohen’s 1963 film, “The High Lonesome Sound,” Roscoe Holcomb, a coal miner, construction worker and banjo player, sits hunched over a songbook on the threadbare sofa in his ramshackle house, singing the Baptist hymns he learned as a boy. Holcomb has long since abandoned the austere Old Regular Baptist Church…
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December 10, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward It’s been a bad time for pants maker Abraham Roth of Rivington Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as he is currently on trial for the murder of his wife, Bertha. The first witness in the trial, a police officer, described the scene he saw upon entering the Roth…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: ‘The Jewish Way’
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite is partnering 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, Michael Miloff writes about “The Jewish Way: Living…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: ‘Shema is for Real’
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite is partnering 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, Ira J. Wise writes about “Shema is For…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: ‘Engendering Judaism’
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite is partnering 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, Idit Klein writes about “Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive…
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Dan Miron’s Authoritative Answer
From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking By Dan Miron Stanford University Press, 560 pages, $65 Dan Miron’s “From Continuity to Contiguity” is a work of Jewish literary theory — an exceedingly erudite one, and in some ways the most important to appear in recent decades — that reads a little like…
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Yearning for the Past in the Future
Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging Edited by Derek Rubin Brandeis University Press, 336 pages, $26 We continue to be in the tricky business of trying to define what we mean (or don’t mean) by “Jewish writer.” Any writer who is a Jew? Only a writer, Jewish or not, who includes…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: ‘Nine Talmudic Readings’
In celebration of Jewish Book Month, The Arty Semite is partnering 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, Ari Weiss writes about “Nine Talmudic Readings” by…
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