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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The Kosher Contender
Professional athletes lead interesting lives. Yuri Foreman’s life has been really interesting. Foreman was born in 1980 in the Soviet Union and started his boxing training at 7 years old. He kept it up when his family immigrated to Israel in 1991, eventually winning three national championships. To further his career, Foreman came to the…
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A Salute to Jewish Theater Producer Joseph Papp
The Brooklyn-born Jewish theatrical producer and director Joseph Papp (born Joseph Papirofsky) died of prostate cancer almost exactly eighteen years ago, and has never been more missed, as “Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told,” a new oral history from Doubleday Publishers, proves. The value of the book,…
The Latest
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A Bauhausful of Antisemites
The 90th anniversary of the founding of Bauhaus movement in 1919 has led to a flurry of museum exhibits across Europe and a Berlin exhibit that is now at New York’s MoMA. The progressive Bauhaus artists, architects, and designers, led by German architect Walter Adolph Georg Gropius were shut down by the Nazis in 1933,…
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A Concerto for Ancient Hebrew Ram’s Horn
Composer Meira Warshauer has taken the shofar out of the synagogue and into the concert hall. Though she is not the first to use the shofar in a concert setting, her concerto for shofar/trombone soloist and orchestra, called “Tekeeyah (a call),” highlights the shofar’s range as an instrument, beyond its traditional ritual role. The concerto,…
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’18’ and Life — as an Arab-Israeli
Natan Dvir’s “18” is a photo-documentary project that focuses on the lives of 18-year-old Arab-Israelis. This is a pivotal age — one at which most Jewish Israelis join the Israel military, while most Arab Israelis do not. Divr’s exhibit — opening November 12, 2009, and on view through January 28, 2010 at Laurie M. Tisch Gallery at…
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Music The Lilith Fair Returns; Feminists Shrug
The 1990s era music festival Lilith Fair — like The Sisterhood’s fellow Jewish women’s magazine Lilith — derives its name from the Jewish medieval myth about the first woman on earth, exiled because of her refusal to submit to Adam’s rule. A nebulous character who shows up in various cultural myths, the Lilith figure has…
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Talmud vs. Anna Akhmatova
Those thus inclined will be hearing Parshat Vayera in shul this shabbos. Among the big stories inhabiting the text, the tale of Lot’s wife is allotted but a single sentence. She turns around to look at Sodom, and becomes a pillar of salt. Midrash, which calls her Idit, provides different opinions about the events. One…
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Transforming the Y
Since taking over as executive director in 2007, Stephen Hazan Arnoff has looked to transform the 14th Street Y of the Educational Alliance both conceptually and physically. The first phase of the building renovation reflects the Y’s attempt to use art and design to enhance a sense of community. In this audio slideshow, Esther Sperber…
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November 13, 1989
100 Years Ago In the Forward When a taxi cab pulled up outside Max Shneier’s Suffolk Street Saloon, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at midnight, a few men got out and walked into the saloon with revolvers in hand and started shooting. The customers dove onto the floor and into corners, trying to avoid the…
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Against Israeli Anti-Mizrahism
Described by Gerald Jacobs in the London Telegraph as “an important document, which should be read by everyone worried about the Middle East,” Rachel Shabi’s “You Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands” is an impassioned argument against the neglect of the country’s Middle Eastern identity, evidenced by the…
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EnviroJews Avant La Lettre
When it comes to talk of sustainable agriculture and eco-Judaism, the history of American Jewry’s attempts to create an equally sustainable class of Jewish “agriculturists” has gotten lost in the shuffle. That’s a shame, because the story of how largely urban immigrants from Eastern Europe found themselves harvesting beans and cultivating chickens is a whopping…
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