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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Wearing Europe’s Tattoo
Foreign Bodies By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages, $26 Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition and every other challenge to the world as it is: ambition. From ancient times,…
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Stealth Museum
Pan Pacific Park has long been an oasis in Los Angeles’s bustling, heavily Jewish Beverly-Fairfax neighborhood. Basketball courts, baseball diamonds, picnic areas and playgrounds predominate in the park’s hilly setting. It may strike certain visitors as somewhat incongruous, therefore, that the latest addition to the park is an institution that appears to run counter to…
The Latest
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Move On Up (Toward Your Destination)
“When someone moved to Israel, we used to say he was ‘going on aliyah.’ Over the past 10 to 15 years, the phrase has changed to ‘He made aliyah.’ This doesn’t seem to make sense in either English or Hebrew. How did the change come about?” Over the past 20 to 25 years may be…
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Shedding Grim Light
The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans By Mark Jacobson Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $26 In this podcast, Jon Kalish speaks with Mark Jacobson, author of ‘The Lampshade.’: Why are people so reluctant to publish a photograph of Mark Jacobson’s lampshade? Because the lampshade is almost certainly made of human…
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The Gate and The Gatekeepers: Kamenetz, Kafka and Reb Nachman
Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka By Rodger Kamenetz Schocken/Nextbook, 384 pages, $25. In “Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka,” Rodger Kamenetz has set for himself the ambitious task of bringing about a meeting of sorts between two great men who lived 100 years and hundreds of miles apart….
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Marching Toward Obscenity
Some years ago, on an overcast spring morning, I visited Majdanek, the Nazi concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. I recall many disturbing sights from that day — the gas chamber, the barracks, the monumental concrete bowl containing tons of human ash. But one unnerving sight was more about the living: the teenagers who had wrapped…
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Mexican Jews in the Land of Death
One might think, since two of the more or less half dozen Jewish-themed Mexican films are about a wake, that the Mexican-Jewish community of about 35,000 is obsessed with death. And indeed, it might well be. After all, Mexico’s fascination with death is ubiquitous, from the Aztec ritual of sacrificing virgins to the gods at…
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Who’s That Guy in the Black Hat Next to Cuomo?
Only one ultra-Orthodox fixer appears to have accompanied New York gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Cuomo on all four of his early October visits to Brooklyn’s Hasidic rebbes. A YouTube video (see below) shows the man, wearing the fedora typical of the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox, sitting diagonal to Cuomo in a meeting with Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum, one…
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October 22, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward It is not known why Henry Greenwald wanted to kill Adolph “Pickles” Berg, but as the former chased the latter down a street in New York City’s Harlem area, pointing a revolver at him, “Pickles” grabbed a 12-year-old schoolboy by the name of Charlie Fisher and used him as…
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Howard Jacobson Wins Literary Prize
Howard Jacobson’s “The Finkler Question” has won this year’s Man Booker Prize. In Britain, where they still read lots of books, they take their literary prizes seriously, and the Booker is the Oscar of prizes. It means more than the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award rolled into one. The prize money…
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The Nigun Project: Silent Song
I have known Basya Schechter since I was a teenager — longer than I have known any of my other Nigun Project collaborators, thus far. And “Pharaoh’s Daughter,” Basya’s remarkable world fusion singing-songwriting project, has become a phenomenon in the Jewish music world. Somehow over the years of frequently crossing paths and sharing a band…
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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
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Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
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Fast Forward Halal restaurant opening in Congress is like ‘Muslim conquest of Jerusalem,’ says GOP congressman
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Fast Forward Germany formally classifies far-right AfD party as extremist, in blow to Nazi-linked populist movement
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Fast Forward Trump taps shock jock Sid Rosenberg and a Haredi newspaper publisher for Holocaust Memorial Council
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