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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October 16, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward The general strike of the neckwear makers was going smoothly, and no violence had occurred. The bosses were going to and from their offices, and it looked like the strike was going to be settled. One shop that was holding out, the Star Neckwear Company — eventually refused to…
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Hopelessly Lost on the Prairie of Existence
From Jonah onwards, the Jews have been happy to write nebbishes into the part of divine liaison. Not for the Chosen People the luxury of a muscular charismatic leader to mediate between the Sacred and the profane. Given the choice between “Woody” Allen Konigsberg and “Terminator” Arnold Schwarzenegger, there’s barely a flicker of thought necessary….
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See Anne Frank Footage Here
We didn’t know how much truth we were telling. This week we ran an article about Francine Prose’s new book on Anne Frank. We entitled Tova Mirvis’s review “Hidden Writer Revealed” because Anne Frank was not only famously hidden from the Nazis but because (certainly according to Prose) her literary talents have also been overshadowed…
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Architect Richard Meier’s Jewish Inspirations
The Newark-born American Jewish architect Richard Meier, who celebrates his 75th birthday on October 12, is being feted with an all-too-brief exhibit, “Meier 75” at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. The exhibit is scheduled to end on Meier’s birthday, which shows party pooper planning on the part of the Cooper-Hewitt committee that have chosen to…
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Minnesota Nebbish
They weren’t as bored and uninterested as they were when they won the best picture Oscar for “No Country for Old Men,” but Joel and Ethan Coen weren’t exactly thrilled to be part of a roundtable interview about their latest movie, “A Serious Man.” In the 25 years since their startling film noirish debut with…
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Even This Review Is God
Everything Is God: The Path of Nondual Judaism By Jay Michaelson Trumpeter, 304 pages, $17.95. Jay Michaelson is well known to readers of the Forward for his column, “The Polymath,” a title well chosen to mitigate the frequent changes in his byline, which varied from dot-com software designer, to doctoral student in Jewish mysticism, to…
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Drawn to The Beat of a Generation
The Beats: A Graphic History Written by Harvey Pekar, et al. Illustrated by Ed Piskor, et al. Edited by Paul Buhle When Samuel Johnson was asked to join a venture to reprint English poets from Chaucer to the present, most of them major and some minor, it was at first a commercial effort. The London…
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On Adorno On Music
Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962 By Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Wieland Hoban Seagull Books, 492 pages, $29.00. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was a philosopher only after he was a composer, as if the music he made in his youth required an entire system, and a later age, of interpretation. There was a method to…
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Why We Don’t Say Shanath Tovath
James A. Goldman writes from Brooklyn: “In this holiday season, I have noticed increasingly that one sees printed ‘Shana Tova’ instead of what I remember as ‘Shanah Tovah,’ even though the latter is more in keeping with the Hebrew orthography, which has a heh at the end of each word. I have also seen the…
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Co Co: Couturier, Collaborator
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel pulled herself up by her bootstraps from her orphanage roots, trading her boots for a pair of two-toned pumps, which she is often credited with popularizing — along with women’s trousers and the little black dress. “Coco Before Chanel,” director Anne Fontaine’s new biopic, starring Audrey Tautou (“Amélie”) in the title role,…
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Music When Jews Were So Cool Arlo Guthrie and Nina Simone Wanted To Sing Israeli Folk Songs
Somewhere in the popular mythology of Jewish paranoia there was a time when everyone loved us. The legend goes that just after the goyim stopped believing we all had horns and just before they started hating Israel for, well, surviving, there was a moment where we were so deeply beloved that black icons, white icons,…
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