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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Twice Beware the Aryan Nation
Thinking about Iran and the Bomb the other day (what newspaper reader doesn’t?), it struck me as a curious coincidence that, for the second time in some of our lifetimes, Jews are being threatened with mass destruction in the name of the same ancient Indo-European word. This is because “Iran” and “Aryan” are connected. The…
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June 4, 2010
100 Years Ago in The Forward After learning from friends that his wife was cheating on him, William Schwartz, a chicken dealer on East 9th Street, found the alleged transgressor in a saloon. Upon seeing Schwartz enter the saloon, the man in question, a Pennsylvania Railroad employee named John Strumpf, ran into Weinstock’s Crockery Store….
The Latest
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Say Cheese
At the turn of the 20th century, a young immigrant named Ben Moskowitz took a job as a dairyman among the chaotic jumble of pushcarts and crowded markets in Lower Manhattan. Two generations later, his son and grandson — Joseph and Adam Moskowitz — carry on his legacy at their international cheese and specialty food…
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Video: Forward 50 Panel
Each year, the Forward 50 honors the men and women who are most instrumental in shaping the American Jewish story. Forward editor Jane Eisner recently led a panel discussion at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington D.C. with activist and president of the American Jewish World Service Ruth Messinger, The Weekly Standard’s editor…
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Books South Carolina’s Franklin J. Moses: Scalawag, But No Paskudnyak?
A scalawag may be a nogoodnik or even a paskudnyak, but in the subtitle of Benjamin Ginsberg’s brisk, informed “Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag during Radical Reconstruction” from Johns Hopkins University Press, “scalawag” has a more precise historical meaning. Applied after the Civil War to Southern whites who joined political forces with freed…
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Not Drowning But Waving
Painting whimsies for glossy magazines may be no great cultural achievement, but neither is it proof against more profound investigation. Illustrator and designer Maira Kalman is a sterling example of how an artist can do both. A major touring exhibition, “Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” is at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art,…
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Books Simon Monjack, Husband of the Late Brittany Murphy, Found Dead
Just nine days before his death Sunday night in his Hollywood Hills home, Simon Monjack, 40, who wed the late actress Brittany Murphy in a Jewish ceremony, was making hopeful future plans. The “Factory Girl” producer planned to go on a European vacation with Sharon Murphy, Brittany’s mother. The two had become core pillars of…
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A Trip to Our Motherwell, Ferber and Gottlieb
When church groups go on field trips, do they heckle the bus driver? “NO! WRONG WAY!” Kvetched the back of the Congregation B’nai Israel (CBI) bus, when the driver went towards I-78 not down Vauxhall but, inexplicably, down Valley. My brother, and many other ex-Millburn N.J. New Yorkers, met us at the museum. The Congregation…
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Mr. Cahan’s Neighborhood
Republished together by Dover in 1970, Cahan’s 1896 novella “Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto” and his 1898 collection, “The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto,” are not “Dubliners.” Cahan overwrites. In fact, he is guilty of crossing the street — crossing the street and jumping on a trolley…
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Memento Mori: Jewish Spirituality and the Sanctification of the World
Earth’s crammed with Heaven And every common bush afire with God — Elizabeth Barrett Browning Western religion can, at times, devalue the world. With eyes turned toward heaven, or the afterlife, it can ignore or denigrate the manifest world, criticizing those who love it too much as “pagan” or, in our time, “humanist.” This is…
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Wonder of Wonders
Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex By Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider Jewish Publication Society of America, 220 pages, $40 There is something profoundly alluring about the manuscripts of great literary works. Whether the handwritten fair copy of “Ode to a Nightingale” or a stray page of Shakespeare, Kafka’s diary…
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