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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I Sing the Body Eclectic
The LABALMA Body Project, a multimedia art exhibit running at New York’s 14th Street Y until November 17, explores ideas of physicality in a genuine, contemplative and engaging way. While its works occasionally verge on the overly literal, the project as a whole is, thankfully, a far cry from simple navel-gazing. A collaboration between LABA…
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Eating Animals Are Wrong
Eating Animals By Jonathan Safran Foer Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $25.99. As a novelist, Jonathan Safran Foer writes with a certain whimsy about violence. In “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” fictional treatments of the Holocaust and the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks contain humor and lyricism to…
The Latest
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Dance by Dance
Deborah Colker is as animated in life as she is on the stage. A director and choreographer with a more than 30-year career, Colker grew up in Brazil to Russian immigrant parents who gave her the Jewish education that she says allowed her to pursue dance and create art. Colker was the first woman to…
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Religion Is Actually Spirituality
Religion vs. spirituality. We hear the opposition all the time. “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual,” increasing numbers of Americans say every year. Conversely, many Jews insist that they follow Halacha, Jewish law, not out of any subjective spiritual motive, but because it is commanded by God. I, too, have often claimed that spiritual practice is…
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Toward a Jewish Architecture?
Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue By Susan G. Solomon Brandeis University Press, 236 pages, $45. Long regarded as one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, Louis Kahn has become the focus of renewed popular attention. The Oscar-nominated documentary film “My Architect” (directed by his son,…
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When in Rome (Don’t Call Yourself Roman)
From down under in Melbourne, Australia, Lauren Wiener writes: “Could you please explain how ‘Nusach Sfard’ came to be the Nusach of some Ashkenazi Jews and why the family name Ashkenazi exists mostly among Sephardic Jews?” Let’s take part two of the question first. Although on first thought it may seem illogical that Sephardic Jews…
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November 6, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward New York City police detectives are working overtime on the Lower East Side to catch a gang of horse poisoners that has been plaguing the Jewish quarter for some time. During the past year, for example, more than 250 horses were poisoned on the Lower East Side alone, and…
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A Modern Esther Returns
After a year spent dark while renovating what is now the David H. Koch Theater, the New York City Opera has chosen to revive one of the most powerful American Jewish operas for its first full production of the season. On November 7, Hugo Weisgall’s “Esther,” which premiered in 1993 to nearly universal acclaim, will…
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Gabriel and Fanny — A Jewish-Israeli Tale of Love and Hate
Grandfather left Grandmother. In those days it was considered a scandal, a secret whispered behind closed doors, unsuited, God forbid, for children’s ears. Like death, divorce was never mentioned. In those days people didn’t get divorced and didn’t die. Grandfather left Grandmother, but he also left my father, a six-month old baby at the time,…
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The Holocaust Novel From Israel That America Can’t Handle
And the Rat Laughed By Nava Semel, Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger Hybrid Publishers, 232 pages, $25.00 ‘And the Rat Laughed” is an exquisitely wrought meditation on the present and future of Holocaust memory in Israel after the survivors are gone. Integrating story, legend, poetry, dream, science fiction and diary, Semel’s novel begins…
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High School Reunion
In the summer of 1973, when they last saw each other, Jane and Susie were a couple of frizzy-haired Jewish girls on the letter “E” page of the Mount Vernon High School yearbook. Now, older than their mothers were then, and with seven children and stepchildren between them, Jane Eisner is the editor of the…
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