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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Books Why Is This Night Different? Who’s Asking?
Open-Eyed Heart-Wide Haggadah By Debra Jill Mazer, edited by Shira Leba Batalion, designed by Margo Jennifer Akroyd Double Gemini Press, 62 pages, $32.95 In Every Generation: The JDC Haggadah Commentary by Ari L. Goldman, Foreword by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Devora Publishing, 96 pages., $24.95 The Kabbalah Haggadah: Pesach Decoded By Yehuda Berg The Kabbalah Centre…
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Fussing on the Cliff
All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems By Charles Bernstein Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 A few years ago, following a John Zorn concert, I was standing outside, chatting with an acquaintance about the phenomenon of the Jewish avant-garde. Suddenly, a man of a certain age, with a strong Brooklyn accent, barged in:…
The Latest
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Signposts to the Middle of Nowhere
Neal Gale writes from St. Paul, Minn.: “My parents, both American-born Yiddish/English speakers, would use two words that referred to places that were hard to find or get to: ‘Yah-Chupetz-Ville’ and ‘Allah-Drerden.’ What do these words really mean?” Mr. Gale’s parents had a sense of humor. “Yah-Chupetz-Ville” is none other than Sholom Aleichem’s Yehupetz, the…
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March 26, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward News has reached the Forward that a group of butcher shop bosses in the Bronx has conspired to do away with the union, and so the workers will be forced to go back to the old conditions of 18 to 20 hours per day. They will thus have to…
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The Nigun Project: Reb Nachman’s Nigun
Listen to Jeremiah Lockwood and Sahr Nguajah’s reinterpretation of Reb Nachman’s nigun Nigunim, or songs without words, were a crucial outward expression of the religious experience of the 18th-century Hasidic revivalist movement. The early Hasidim created a new and distinctly Jewish ritual act by singing these meditative and incantatory melodies in chorus with a community…
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Hot Lands of Clay
Considering how often the word “fragile” is used to describe Israel — its politics, peace, peoplehood — it makes perfect sense that a new exhibit at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum uses ceramic art to explore modern life there. “From the Melting Pot Into the Fire: Contemporary Ceramics in Israel,” organized with the Ceramic Artists Association of…
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Going Down to Funky Town
Listen To Abraham Inc.’s “Tweet Tweet”: Here are a few lyrics from “Tweet Tweet,” the title track from Abraham Inc.’s recently released debut album: “We bring the nigguns from the street/Get off your seat/Stamp your feet/Come and touch me in the tweet tweet/Ya da di bum bum, ya da di bum bum, ya da di…
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It’s Complicated
Can you have déjà vu for something you don’t remember? Watching the news about Iran these days, I feel as if it’s 1967 all over again. Once again, a leader of a large Middle Eastern country, a man with ambitions to be the leader of the region, threatens Israel with annihilation. Once again, evidence appears…
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St. Patrick’s Day With the Irish and the Jews
Talk about a combination, heed my words and take a note On St. Patrick’s Day Rosinsky pins a shamrock on his coat… …Without the Pats or Isadores, we’d have no big department stores If it wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews. Listen to Mick Moloney’s “If It Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews”:…
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A Big-Headed Dandy
Bernard Weill writes: “I have often heard the Yiddish word ‘shvitzer’ applied to someone but have been too embarrassed to ask what it meant. Is it a derogatory term?” A shvitzer is a braggart, and the term is definitely derogatory, though not in the extreme. A shvitzer need not necessarily be a bad, unkind or…
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March 19, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward As tragedies go, it will be difficult to beat the story of Solomon Schwalb, a resident of 86th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, who, in biblical fashion, was tricked into marrying the sister of the woman he loved. Having recently arrived in America, he was taken in by…
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