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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Engraved on the Unconscious: French Historian Élisabeth Roudinesco on Antisemitism
On a subject where hysteria often seems to reign, a brilliant, well thought-out and balanced new book like “Return to the Jewish Question” (Retour sur la question juive) by the French historian and psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco is a treasure which urgently deserves translation into English. Now 65, Roudinesco, niece of the noted French Jewish feminist…
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Defying Threats and Madoff, the AICF Marches On
Visitors to the America-Israel Cultural Foundation website see bad news and good in anticipation of this year’s gala fundraiser January 10th at Carnegie Hall. The bad news, announced in a banner: “Unfortunately, the bulk of AICF’s endowments were invested with Bernard L. Madoff Securities.” The good news, AICF is one of the few charities to…
The Latest
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Brutal on the Beach
Israeli choreographer Nir de Volff is one of the most promising newcomers on Berlin’s vibrant dance scene. Early in December 2009, expectations ran high for the premiere of “Maktot,” his dissection of the social complexities of beach culture. His previous creation, a site-specific dance in Berlin’s iconic Neue Synagoge called “Action!” had a successful run…
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Revelling in the End of Utopia
Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era By Jean-François Revel, Translated by Diarmid V.C. Cammell Encounter Books, 300 pages, $23.95. Jean-François Revel, who died three years ago this past spring, was America’s most intellectual supporter in France. He was a philosopher and writer, a Resistance fighter during the war (born…
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God Lives, but Not in Cambridge
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Random House 416 pages, $27.95. Here is an ambitious novel about big ideas — love, sex, religion — that nevertheless faces these issues with irony and humor. A novel sprinkled with Yiddish and Hebrew, and populated mostly by secular Jews…
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Back to Kovno
This year, the first comprehensive collection of South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer’s nonfiction works will be published. Consistent with a more pervasive silence of her generation, it is unlikely to include more than scant reference to her father’s Lithuanian background. A younger generation of Jewish South African artists of Lithuanian descent, including textile designer…
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Kalanter Banter
An eponym is a word formed from someone’s name. Most languages have them, and English alone has hundreds — some that are clearly so, and others disguised as ordinary-looking words. You don’t have to be an etymologist or a newspaper reader to guess that “Ponzi scheme” probably derives from a man named Ponzi. On the…
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January 8, 2010
100 Years Ago in the forward More information on “King of the Pimps” Samuel Rogoff has come to light after his recent arrest. Rogoff, who is known on the street as “Sam the Painter,” maintained dozens of apartments, mainly in the Harlem section of Manhattan, that served as brothels. His main partner in crime was…
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The Midas Touch of Hungarian-Jewish architect Ernö Goldfinger
Long derided as a creator of “Brutalist” architecture, the Budapest-born Ernö Goldfinger in 1902 has more recently won respect and even admiration, as two London local councils opted in November 2009 to preserve the low-lying buildings which he designed near his landmark high-rise social housing Trellick Tower itself now a “listed building” of special significance….
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Just Passing Through
Life as a Visitor By Angella M. Nazarian Assouline Publishing, 168 pages, $45.00. Driven by American interest in the Middle East, the past 10 years have produced a slew of memoirs and novels by Iranian émigrés, especially women. Farideh Goldin, in her essay “Iranian Women and Contemporary Memoirs,” attributes this boom to four main factors:…
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132 Years of American Jewish Fiction
It’s not news that Jews tell the same stories over and over again. Anyone who has attended a Simchat Torah celebration knows that when the congregation finally reaches the last sentence of the Torah, they take a deep breath, twirl around a few times, drink a little schnapps, and then, with no further ado, start…
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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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Fast Forward Reconstructionist leader to step down as head of movement riven by tension over anti-Zionism
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