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 9, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward For each day that has passed during the strike at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company something unusual has happened. The streets surrounding the factory are still filled with police, plainclothes detectives and hired goons. The police threaten the strikers and make arrests without any reason. It looks like a war…
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Hidden Writer Revealed
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife By Francine Prose HarperCollins, 336 pages, $24.99. The diary that Anne Frank so famously kept was found by Miep Gies and given to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, when he alone survived and returned to the secret annex after the war. The published version of those pages was…
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Music Spanish Fly
No one strums more sexuality from a banjo than Dan Saks. And no one squeezes more soul out of a Glockenspiel than Amy Crawford. The duo, two-fifths of Brooklyn-based alt-Sephardi indie band DeLeon, flew through an energetic set on September 24, the gig that started their 18 nights opening for Tropicália psych-rockers Os Mutantes. Too…
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Drawing the Devil Away From Children
As if to raise a curtain on the coming celebration of Maurice Sendak, the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum has unveiled a probing, multidimensional exhibit showing the back story of the children’s author and illustrator, whose “Where the Wild Things Are” is about to open as a major motion picture. Heralded by high-decibel discussion, including…
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Revenge, a Dish Best Served Convincing
Over the summer, much was made in the media of the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Jewish revenge picture, “Inglorious Basterds.” A mix of structural virtuosity and moral and emotional nincompoopery, the film expressed Tarantino’s lip-smacking love of torture, and titillated audiences were delighted by its sadism. Daniel Goldfarb’s similarly themed play, “The Retributionists,” has had…
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Supreme Jewish Achievement
Louis D. Brandeis: A Life By Melvin I. Urofsky Pantheon Books, 976 pages, $40.00. Louis Brandeis was the Jewish Barack Obama. Or, if not, perhaps the legal Henry Kissinger. Perhaps smarter (graduating from Harvard Law School with the highest GPA on record) but less political, he was the golden boy of the judiciary and the…
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A Free Account of Liberal Jewish History
Why Are Jews Liberals? By Norman Podhoretz Doubleday, 352 pages, $27.00. Norman Podhoretz, who was the editor of Commentary magazine for four decades, has caused a stir regularly with his essays and books. “Why Are Jews Liberals?” is no exception. Part historical lesson, part autobiography (the latter a genre that Podhoretz first explored in his…
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Yours Is the Earth and Everything In It
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.99. The moment occurs in the life of nearly every important novelist, sooner or later. And in these novelists’ defense, often as not, they cry, “My editor made me do it!” “It” in this case is…
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The Great War: A Letter From the Front Deciphered
Forward reader Leonard Nelson has presented me with a challenge. “Attached to my e-mail,” he writes, “is a photograph and note from my father sent to his family while serving in the Russian army in World War I. The note is written in a cursive Yiddish that I cannot read. I would appreciate any assistance…
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October 2, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward A Bintel Brief has a letter written by an embittered man who ran into trouble getting together a minyan for his son’s bris. It was the eve of Yom Kippur and, as he stood in front of his building, trying to find a 10th man for the minyan, a…
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Film & TV Yom Kippur on the Big Screen
Would you shut up? I’m trying to atone!” That line comes in the opening scene of “Kissing Jessica Stein” delivered by the titular character, as she sits in the pews on Yom Kippur and tries to fend off her relatives’ too-eager advice about snagging a man before next year’s Book of Life is shut. Jessica,…
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