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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December 11, 2009
100 Years Ago in the Forward On Manhattan’s East Side, 11th Street resident Israel Gleichman was in the Essex Market Court trying to prevent his 12-year-old son from going to jail. “Until he went to public school,” Gleichman pleaded, “my boy was all right. It was his friends from school who taught him how to…
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Remembering a Great Voice from Regostan: Bukharan Jewish Musician Ilyas Malayev
Often forgotten in the upsurge of interest in Jews from the former Soviet Union, the Bukharans have claim to a grievance. But, on December 14, a gala concert, “Ilyas Malayev: Remembering the Poet Laureate of the Bukharian Jews,” will be performed at New York’s Center for Jewish History, presented by that organization’s An-sky Institute for…
The Latest
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Anna Sokolow
Alvin Ailey danced for her as a young man. She worked with Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams on Broadway, and taught Patti LuPone and Robin Williams at the Juilliard School. Anna Sokolow passed away in 2000 at the age of 90; she would have been 100 years old in 2010. This inventive, elegant yet gritty…
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Berlin Jews and Jazz
Celebrations for the 70th birthday of legendary jazz label Blue Note Records are taking place at an unlikely venue. The Jewish Museum Berlin is tooting its horn with an exhibition of photographs by two of Blue Note’s Jewish photographers, Francis Wolff and Jimmy Katz. Wolff, a Berlin native, helped found the label in 1939, along…
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Skeletons in the Closet
Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret: By Steve Luxenberg Hyperion Books, 401 pages, $24.99 In a letter written on a yellow legal pad, placed in an envelope marked “Do not open until after my death,” Beth Luxenberg (née Cohen) directed that all her possessions be distributed equally among her children and grandchildren. She…
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The Catskills, Under a New Lens
For anyone who stood on line, week after week, for the Saturday midnight screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in the 1970s, the West Village theater now known as the IFC Center will forever be branded the Waverly. For a time during my teens, going down to that theater with friends to watch the…
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Hell Hath No Fury Like a Lévy Scorned: novelist Justine Lévy’s Latest Screed.
Justine Lévy, daughter of the headline-grabbing French philosopher and “public intellectual” Bernard-Henri Lévy (known in France as BHL), is once again in the news with a new novel from Paris’ Stock publishers, “Mauvaise fille” (Bad Daughter ). Like her previous books, “Mauvaise fille” is not really a “roman à clef” because no “clef” (key) is…
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Typography in the Talmudic Tradition: American Jewish Designer Herb Lubalin
Fans of splendid graphic design and typography have until December 8 to catch the exhibit, “Lubalin Now” at The Cooper Union’s Cooper Gallery. It opened November 5 to honor the highly influential Jewish typographer and graphic designer Herb Lubalin who died in 1981. Known for his work for the magazines “Avant Garde,” “Eros,” and “Fact,”…
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Arguments for Tsnius No. 614: JILFs and Bad Sex
Jewish women are so hot that everyone wants to gaze at them and more. If you don’t know what a MILF is, I’m not telling you what a JILF is, except that the J stands for Jewesses, but this is what Details magazine reported: In a recent poll on the porn blog Fleshbot, “Jewish girls”…
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Metamorphosis
What if Kafka had been hip? Eli Valley’s latest comic delves into the world of cool Jews in the Habsburg Empire, circa 1903. Click on the thumbnail to the right for a larger version: Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His column, “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in a…
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Sami Rohr Finalists Announced
The finalists for the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize have been announced. The prize, the largest one in Jewish writing ($100,000 to the winner, $25,000 to the first runner-up), alternates each year between fiction and nonfiction and this year its nonfiction’s turn. No man has ever won the prize. The winner will be announced at the…
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