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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‘Shoah’ Did Not Age
In 1985, Claude Lanzmann released “Shoah,” a 550-minute epic film that changed the way people understood the Holocaust and the relation between history and cinema. Traveling through many countries Lanzmann recorded, in many languages, tens of people who were witness to different aspects of the systematic extermination of European Jewry. Now 85 years old, and…
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Books Not a Historical Record
Earlier this week, Ruth Franklin wrote about sharing a stage with Yann Martel and discussed whether anything new can be said about the Holocaust. She is the author of “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book…
The Latest
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What Is This Thing We Call Jewish Literature?
Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging 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 Jewish “content” in his…
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A Relentless Rebellion Against Unfairness
For those who believe in a documentary film that is pitiless, sometimes harrowing, but always relentlessly veracious, December 17 is the last chance to catch the yearlong Museum of Modern Art tribute to Frederick Wiseman, who turned 80 last January. Related festivities have included this past June’s AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival, in Silver Spring,…
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Rhyming Slang For Four By Twos
Forward reader Susan Hessel writes: “I am reading a book called ‘The Report,’ a novel based on an incident in a London bomb shelter in 1943. In the book, Jews, particularly Jewish refugees, are referred to as ‘four-by-twos.’ Although this is apparently Cockney rhyming slang, I have never heard the expression before and wonder what…
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December 3, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward It has been said that New York City’s Jewish bums are worse than its gentile bums. In a way, this is true. Twenty-five years ago, when the neighborhood still had saloons on the corners, a Jew couldn’t pass by without getting smacked or insulted by a drunken Irishman. And…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: ‘I and Thou’
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, Jonathan Woocher writes about “I and Thou” by…
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Earthbound Angels
As part of a season devoted to Tony Kushner’s work, Signature Theater Company has daringly chosen to remount the epic masterpiece “Angels in America” for the first time since its Broadway run in 1993, providing an opportunity to look at the play anew, this time with an eye toward how it holds up outside of…
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Books Everything We Need to Know
On Monday, Ruth Franklin wrote about sharing a stage with Yann Martel. She is the author of “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction.” 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…
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Books 30 Days, 30 Texts: ‘On Being a Jewish Feminist’
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, Nigel Savage writes about “On Being a Jewish…
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Books Video: What Freedom Meant in Europe
When we talk about the Enlightenment, or the Haskalah, in Europe, we have a general historical sense that all Jews were in ghettos and then the walls came down. One day pogroms, the next Einstein, Freud and Kafka. The period of time was indeed extraordinary, as Michael Goldfarb elucidates in his book “Emancipation: How Liberating…
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Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
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