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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The Life (and Death and Life) Of the Rebbe
The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson By Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman Princeton University Press, 382 Pages, 29.95 Most Jewish New Yorkers vividly remember the Crown Heights riots of August 1991, four horrendous days of attacks on Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jews that resulted in the brutal murder of Yaakov Rosenbaum, a young…
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Honesty Is Real
Wherever You Go By Joan Leegant W.W. Norton 272 pages, $23.95 Finally, a novel about Israel by an American Jew that’s written well and without sentimentality. Joan Leegant’s “Wherever You Go” is unafraid to address the pivotal but ambiguous role that Israel plays in providing an identity for certain types of American Jews. Israel, in…
The Latest
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Playing it Safe
The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff: and Other Stories By Joseph Epstein Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages, $24 This compact collection of short stories, almost all of them set in Chicago, is about Jewish men of a certain age who have been playing it safe for all of their mostly passionless though not unsuccessful…
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How Belief Has Shaped America’s Laws
THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW By Sarah Barringer Gordon Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 316 pages, $29.95 Legal scholars usually tell us that law, especially constitutional law, shapes religion: nurturing its growth under the Free Exercise clause, while inhibiting its power under the Establishment clause. Sally Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law…
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A Little Something for the Summer?
Forward staffers and contributors share their picks for beach-friendly reads. The offerings include historical fiction, a three-author memoir about unconventional paths to motherhood and a collection of darkly humorous essays. NOVEL, AND FRESH The Invisible Bridge By Julie Orringer Knopf, 624 pages, $26.95 In a field as crowded with artistic representations as the Holocaust, it’s…
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Religion Within the Bounds of Reason… and Love
Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition By Arthur Green Yale University Press, 208 pages, $26 ‘I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in,” Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal, wrote many years ago. Reb Zalman was responding to an imagined atheist, or perhaps an alienated Jew — someone with a…
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Adversary A
The Death of the Adversary: A Novel By Hans Keilson Translated by Ivo Jarosy Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pages, $14.00 Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel By Hans Keilson Translated by Damion Searls Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 144 pages, $22.00 Hans Keilson was born in Germany in 1909 to a working-class Jewish family…
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All Stories Are True
Three decades after his death at age 70, the art of socially involved Jewish American painter Ben Shahn has never been more widely admired and discussed. A brilliant catalog by Alejandro Anreus for the landmark 2001 exhibit at the Jersey City Museum, “Ben Shahn and ‘The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti,’” analyzed the artist’s extensive…
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Awake and Act, For It Can Happen Here
On April 8, 1935, congressional legislation created the Works Progress Administration, which developed millions of jobs for the unemployed. WPA agencies placed 8.5 million Americans on the federal payroll, including hundreds of Yiddish actors, writers, scene designers and theater directors hired for the administration’s Federal Theatre Project. On the 75th anniversary of the WPA and…
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Bliss, By Way of Adult Movies
‘Finding Bliss” stars Leelee Sobieski as Jody Balaban, a young film school graduate who heads out to Los Angeles with high and naive hopes for a bright future. Ultimately, the only job she can get is editing porn flicks at the same studio where “Gladiator” was shot. Well, not exactly “Gladiator.” It was “Glad He…
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Jews Behaving Badly
The cringe-inducing spectacle of Jews tied to the world financial implosion took center stage at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Even fiction got in on the act. From investment bankers called out by the documentary “Inside Job” to the haimish yet shady broker played by Frank Langella in the new feature “Wall Street: Money Never…
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