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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A Thrill From Beyond the Grave
Love and its crushing disappointments are at the center of Hanoch Levin’s newly discovered play, “Thrill My Heart,” “Hartiti et Leebee” in Hebrew, running now at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv. The play, written by Israel’s most renowned playwright, was discovered shortly after Levin’s death in 1999 and caused a stir of excitement and…
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Of Fags, Flags, Faggots and Feygeles
David Herszenson of Manhattan writes: “I know that feygele literally means ‘little bird’ in Yiddish and came to mean ‘gay’ among Yiddish speakers as well. In a rudimentary Internet search, I discovered that the word ‘fag’ began to mean ‘gay’ in American slang in the early 1900s, at the peak of the Eastern European Jewish…
The Latest
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April 30, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward Louis Cantor, a Philadelphia-based pimp, was sentenced to six years in prison for raping and forcing a woman, Dora Rubin, into a life of prostitution. The trial, which riveted Jewish Philadelphia, contained moments of real drama, such as when Rubin took the stand to testify against Cantor. The entire…
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The Nigun Project: At the Table
Listen to Jeremiah Lockwood and Brian Chase perform the second installment of the Nigun Project, “At the Table”: Part of my motivation for starting the Nigun Project — in which I reinterpret nigunim, with a range of musical collaborators — was to have a good reason to spend sizable chunks of time staring at old…
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The Surfing Jihadi
American Taliban By Pearl Abraham Random House, 272 pages, $25 Just in case the worldwide hatred of America wasn’t enough, here’s something else to worry about: “homegrowns,” or Americans who become so identified with radical Islam that they are willing to perform acts of violence. Sometimes it’s abroad, as with John Walker Lindh, whose conversion…
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Too Clever by Half
Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate By Mark Oppenheimer Free Press, 256 pages, $25 Being a smart kid isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, but it usually pays off in the end. That, at least, is the lesson taught by Mark Oppenheimer in his alternately tender and comic memoir, “Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject…
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The New Face of Yiddish Theater
In 1996, Shane Baker looked like just another New York City cliché: a young gay man, recently arrived in the Big Apple from Kansas City, Mo., waiting tables at Tavern on the Green and planning his entry into the world of New York theater. But Baker’s story was unusual, even for New York. A Yiddish-speaking…
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Spark Flies
Muriel Spark: The Biography By Martin Stannard W.W. Norton & Company, 656 pages, $35 The Scottish novelist Muriel Spark is mostly famous for a single book, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” made into an Oscar-winning film, and for her 1954 conversion to Catholicism. Now, a new biography by Martin Stannard offers fascinating new information…
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Barry Knows Jack
Len Amato, head of HBO films, called up director Barry Levinson. “He said, ‘We’ve got this script [by Adam Mazer].’” Levinson said. “I talked to [Amato], and said I was interested.” Levinson is talking on the phone about “You Don’t Know Jack,” about Jack Kevorkian. Known as “Dr. Death,” Kevorkian went to prison in his…
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The Last Philologos Ever?
The announcement in the April 9 issue of the Forward of my 1,000th column took me by surprise because, by my own calculations, the millennium should have come a week later. Perhaps my mistake was failing to count leap years. An extra day every four years may not seem like much, but over a period…
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April 23, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Brooklyn’s district attorney has interviewed more than 20 Jewish businessmen who were fleeced by a gang of Jewish horse poisoners. The poisoners were rumored to have bilked more than $30,000 out of dozens of businessmen in Brooklyn and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Currently, three of the horse poisoners…
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