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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‘Sweatshop Cinderella,’ Minus the Happily Ever After
She was “loud, coarse and demanding, constantly intruding her presence everywhere and taking up all the air in the room,” according to literary critic Vivian Gornick. She married twice, divorced quickly and left her daughter with her second husband, the child’s father, in order to write. She was a short-lived star of a writer, whose…
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Private Genius, Public Spotlight
A photography exhibit radiating quiet humanity, honoring the Lithuanian-Jewish photographer Izis, who was born Israëlis Bidermanas, is warming the City of Paris’s chilly official administration building, l’Hôtel de Ville. “Izis, Paris of Dreams” runs until May 29 and is a must-see for anyone visiting the city. A splendid catalog from Les Éditions Flammarion explains the…
The Latest
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Lens on Apartheid’s Haunting Legacy
For more than half a century, South African photographer David Goldblatt has been probing the emotional core of his native land, capturing the human cost, and the haunting legacy, of apartheid. The Jewish Museum’s new retrospective, “South African Photographs: David Goldblatt,” is the first major overview in New York of Goldblatt’s work in more than…
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Mah Jongg’s Jewish Journey
How did the popular Chinese tile game mah jongg become a favorite pastime — often, a social lifeline — for generations of Jewish women in America? Melissa Martens, senior curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, recently sat down in the Forward studio with Sisterhood contributor…
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Books Our Rack: The Sisterhood Reading List
Beginning this month, The Sisterhood will feature a monthly roundup of book recommendations for our readers. We will include books that are geared toward Jewish women, along with other women’s-interest titles that we believe will be of interest to Sisterhood readers. Nonfiction: • A diverse group of writers share their feminist “aha” moments in the…
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Israel’s Postmodern Flash Fiction
Blue Has No South By Alex Epstein; Translated from the Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay Clockroot Books, 131 pages, $15 Miniature Metaphors of an Airport Longings are more a story than a word. (Though I have never managed to write a story about the airport where I heard Hebrew for the first time in my…
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Finding Rabbis and Wandering Jews
In the 19th century, realist authors like Emile Zola and Anatole France were widely worshipped, but literary Symbolism, with its rejection of everyday realism, and prizing of spirituality, also attracted many European Jewish writers. Particularly in France, there appeared a wave of Jewish Symbolists who had social and political activism that was allied with dreamlike…
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Whither Orthodoxy?
Two April conferences in Jerusalem illustrated both sides of the coin of Orthodoxy in Israel, indeed Orthodoxy worldwide. One, the much heralded “The Future of Modern Orthodoxy: Imagine the Future. Join the Conversation,” under the auspices of a National Religious Party spin-off, “Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah,” was held April 1 in Jerusalem and was predictably passionate…
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Putting The High In High School
The November Criminals By Sam Munson Doubleday, 272 pages, $24.95 When you’re a teenager, there’s a sense that life is both as real and consequential as it’s ever going to get and, at the same time, that it’s just a rehearsal for something bigger. In Sam Munson’s debut novel, “The November Criminals,” this helps explain…
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Almost Blue: Israel’s New Borges
Russian-born Israeli author Alex Epstein, 39, hunches forward across the table at the bar. He brushes his long hair out of his face. He scratches his beard. He adjusts his glasses. Epstein’s nervous hands want a cigarette. But at this upscale Denver bar, smoking is off-limits. He has to make do with a glass of…
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Mapping the World at Your Dinner Table
Adam Gladstone writes: “The Hebrew word for tablecloth is mapa. This sounds a lot like the English word map, which according to my dictionary is derived from Latin mappa mundi, that is, ‘a sheet of the world.’ Is it possible that Hebrew mapa derives from the Latin word for sheet?” Possible? Definitely — but this…
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