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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Video ‘Pep Talks’ Take On Jewish Mothering
After the birth of my second child three months ago, nursing late into the night and surfing the Web, I discovered an online video series geared to Orthodox mothers called Mommy Peptalks. These videos offer words of maternal support, guidance and encouragement from Chana “Jenny” Weisberg, the author of several books on Jewish parenting. In…
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The First Glow?
The Last Ember Daniel Levin Riverhead Books 415 pages, $25.99 The last thing the world needs is another “Da Vinci Code” knockoff, especially just as Dan Brown himself is about to publish his own latest knockoff which, however derivative, is likely to be “what the people want.” The second-to-last thing the world needs is another…
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Photo Stroll
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 Salt Mine Until After the War,” appears monthly in The Forward. His Web site is www.evcomics.com. Scroll down to view a slideshow of…
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Fiddlers on the Wane
In the world of Jewish strings, two major but disparate commemorations mark 2009: the centenary of Polish-born Szymon Goldberg, and the 10-year anniversary of the death of Yehudi Menuhin, born seven years later in New York to Belarusian-Jewish parents. A century ago, the violin was a passport out of the ghetto, with Eastern European child…
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Harry and the Holy Land
A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel By Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh HarperCollins, 448 pages, $27.99. It is one of the great ironies of history that a little-known “Midwest Baptist” whose mother-in-law would not allow him to entertain Jews at home, and who scribbled antisemitic diatribes in his diary, was…
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Mixing Opera and Zionism Hessler Installed Where Neo-Nazis Roam
‘When Saxony’s minister of arts presented me to the press in Dresden and the first question was, ‘How do you feel as a woman?’ I was so tempted to say, ‘After 50 years, I’m used to being a woman!’” Ulrike Hessler said, laughing as she recounted the public announcement that she had been chosen intendant…
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J’accuse America
Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters By Louis Begley Yale University Press, 272 pages, $24.00. Convicted in 1894 of selling secrets to Germany, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer trainee on the General Staff, was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in a fortified enclosure on Devil’s Island, a rocky formation near French Guyana. Six…
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You Can Teach Everything, Barring a ‘Disaster’
The new school year has begun in Israel, as in much of the world, and with it a renewed debate over the use in Israeli-Arab schoolchildren’s textbooks of the word nakba, or “disaster,” to designate the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the flight from its territory of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. Approved…
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pecan, rodef, clam
like any nut zipped up tight in its shell. like a clam’s clipped momser, the locked maw talked open by fire — by burly water waitressing flesh, flat as a tongue, to sterile plates. under fissures, a soft sloth, holy fruit, hare -lipped by cleavers, the devil’s hand. sweet meat of the tree. bone boy,…
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September 18, 2009
100 Years Ago In the Forward Manuel Rosa, an “Indian chief” who performs the “war dance” onstage at Inman’s Casino in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, attacked Sam Friedman, a waiter, during a recent performance. Rosa, who was performing in full Indian regalia and waving a tomahawk, was onstage as Friedman approached a group of women sitting…
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Books Double Trouble: Two Newish Novels Sport Eerily Similar Covers
Here’s a situation that harkens back to flipping through children’s magazines in my pediatrician’s office waiting room: What’s the difference between these two pictures? Lucinda Rosenfeld’s “I’m So Happy For You” (Back Bay Books, July 2009) and Laurie Graff’s “The Shiksa Syndrome” (Broadway Books, October, 2008) may have hit shelves more than a year apart,…
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