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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February 26, 2010
100 Years Ago in the Forward Chandelier-maker Jacob Greenthal, known in the saloons of the Manhattan’s West Side as “Mike the Jew,” is in critical condition after being stabbed multiple times by a group of unknown assailants. The lone witness, a taxi driver who was threatened by the gang of attackers, told police that he…
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Books A Graphic Account of the Israeli Countryside
The past year has seen a bumper crop of Jewish-themed graphic novels, with subjects ranging from the recent history of the Middle East (Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza”) to the ancient mythology of the Middle East (R. Crumb’s “Genesis”) to the poets of the Beat Generation (Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor’s “The Beats”). Still, the…
The Latest
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In a Closet With No Light
Homosexuality is one of the most profound and least tractable problems confronting Orthodox Judaism today. The party line — that attraction to members of one’s own sex is simply another illicit desire that must be overcome — is not a sufficient response to the painful experiences of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews. “Eyes Wide Open,”…
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Bernard-Henri Lévy Gets Purim Pranked Early
Purim has come early this year for 61-year-old French “public intellectual” Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), who just published two new books in France, “De la guerre en philosophie: Essai” (On Philosophical War: Essay) and “Pièces d’identité: Chroniques” (Identification Papers: Articles). The latter consists of over 1300 pages of Lévy’s journalism, around 300 pages of which are…
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Books Cyril Kornbluth’s Postwar Dystopias
Readers of the intelligently edited anthologies “Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction” and “More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction,” both from Jewish Lights Publishing, are aware that the postwar development of the sci-fi genre was to a large extent a Yiddishe invention. Alongside…
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Creative Creation
The Center for Jewish History is a hidden treasure buried in the secular haven of New York City’s West Village. With an intellectually pleasing symmetry, Yeshiva University Museum (housed at the Center) is hosting a profoundly religious exhibit from an extremely secular town. San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum organized In the Beginning: Artists Respond to…
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Poetic Yearnings
Yehuda Halevi By Hillel Halkin Nextbook/Schocken, 368 pages, $25. The medieval poet Yehuda Halevi was a man consumed by yearnings, for women, for love, for the divine. All these found expression in Halevi’s prose and poetry. But perhaps none plagued the poet so much as his longing for Israel, a desire that would remain unsatisfied…
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A Loving Levinas on War
The Obi-Wan Kenobi of 20th-century Jewish philosophy, Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, has grown in fame and stature since his death in 1995. Acclaimed for his philosophy of the “other,” which recognizes morality — and behavior toward others — as the basis for any philosophical thought, Levinas offers a decisive break with his onetime teacher…
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Playing in Mali
Jeremiah Lockwood just returned from a trip to the West African nation of Mali with his band, The Sway Machinery. The band performed at the Festival au Desert and recorded an album with Malian guest artists. Americans grow up hearing “Timbuktu” used to mean the most remote place in the world. Though readily reachable these…
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Putting the Id in Yid
Forward reader Ben Warwick wants to know why the Yiddish words for a Jew and for Yiddish, yid and yidish, are often spelled with an initial alef rather than an initial yod, so that they appear in print as id and idish. This is something I myself have often wondered about. Now, under Mr. Warwick’s…
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Archivists and Art
ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN ARCHIVISTS HONORED BY SCONE FOUNDATION “Without the pain of primary research, we would remain hostage to ill-informed writers or authorities,” said Stanley Cohen, founder of the Scone Foundation, at the January 25 presentation of the foundation’s Archivist of the Year award, held at the CUNY Graduate Center at Fifth Avenue and 34th…
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