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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Talking for Weeks, in Tongues
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it…
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Art Jews Have Been Magic for Thousands of Years
We all believe in magic. Despite 300 years of industrial and social revolution, as well as unparalleled explanation of the natural world through the scientific method, we still throw salt over our shoulders, put up hamsas in our homes, wear lucky shirts to job interviews and run through tested game-day rituals, whether we are playing…
The Latest
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Two Poems by Jacqueline Osherow
Love Song to That Performance Poet, My Mother Mom! Guess what? I didn’t inherit nothing — Okay, so maybe I didn’t get your face, your generosity, your perfect kindness. That was you in my kitchen this very morning when Magda refused breakfast (a tad rudely) and I offered her a nice glass of grapefruit juice…
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May 28, 2010
100 Years Ago in The Forward Dora Neigerman caught a burglar in her third-floor Delancey Street apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the middle of the night. Unable to scare him off, Neigerman began to fight with him, smashing him over the head numerous times with a brass spittoon. Though stunned, the burglar continued…
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Formal Punk
Listen to The Shondes’ “Make It Beautiful” Listen to The Shondes’ “My Dear One” There may be more blatantly Jewish punk bands than the Brooklyn-based Shondes — Australia’s YIDCore used to play a ska cover of “If I Were a Rich Man,” and Can!!Can’s Patrick Aleph stage-dives while screaming out lessons from the midrash —…
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The Nigun Project: Melodies I Have Seen
While doing my research for the third installment of The Nigun Project, I discovered a melody in a Yiddish chapbook that was published in New York City in 1947. The book bears the striking title “Yiddish Nigunim I Have Heard…and Seen.” This magical little book, compiled by Moshe Gutman, constitutes a kind of testimonial and…
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The Replacements
The Book of Genesis is filled with replacement and impersonation: Jacob disguises himself as his twin, Esau, to get his father’s inheritance; Rachel replaces her sister, Leah, in Jacob’s bed. So maybe it’s fitting that the new Bible-based show, “Jacob’s House,” at New York’s Flux Theatre Ensemble, is itself a replacement. The show originally scheduled…
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The Salon Celebrates Five Episodes; Sara Hurwitz Is on the Panel
Rabba Sara Hurwitz, the Foundation for Jewish Culture’s President and CEO Elise Bernhardt and the author of “Sabbath World,” Judith Shulevitz, are guests on the fifth episode of The Salon, The Jewish Channel’s women’s issues chat show. Discussion topics include the debate over Orthodox women serving in the rabbinate in light of a major rabbinic…
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The Uxorious Egotist
Shouting Down the Silence: A Biography of Stanley Elkin By David C. Dougherty The University of Illinois Press, 296 pages, $40 Stanley Elkin was not an autobiographical novelist. He never franchised fast-food restaurants (“The Franchiser”), wrestled professionally (“Boswell”), ferried terminally ill children to Disney World (“The Magic Kingdom”) or had sex with a bear (“The…
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A Manifesto for the Seventh Day
The millennial institution of the Sabbath is currently experiencing something of a renaissance — or, at the very least, it’s the object of heightened attention — and not just within traditional Jewish circles. Judith Shulevitz’s recent book, “The Sabbath World” (Random House), a richly textured interrogation of its meaning and history, has made the rounds…
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My Jewish-Muslim Father-in-Law
Mahmud Nasir is a Pakistani Muslim whose passion growing up in Britain during the 1980s was for New Romantic music and, to judge by his love of Tottenham Hotspur, football. He is barely observant, and once wrote a letter to the local paper, arguing that fellow Muslims ought to follow the path of moderation. But…
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