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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A Classroom Film That Explores the Tensions Over Marriage in Israel
Israelis who plan to marry but don’t want their weddings performed by a government-approved Orthodox rabbi have an alternative: They can leave the country. “Ironically, this is the only democratic country in the world in which a Conservative rabbi cannot officiate a marriage according to the law,” Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, head of Jerusalem’s progressive synagogue…
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The Israel Teacher Corps Sends Young English Teachers to the Poorest Towns
Although visitors to Israel’s big cities see what appears to be a prosperous lifestyle, 40% of Israel’s children live below the poverty level, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. Many of these underprivileged children live in the Negev region, where opportunities for a proper English education are sparse. While native English-speaking language teachers flock…
The Latest
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Muslims and Jews: Fostering Respect, Bridging Cultural Differences
When a new venture at Columbia University brought together 30 Muslim and Jewish entrepreneurs from the United States, the United Kingdom and France for a cross-cultural dialogue, the focus was on something other than interfaith work. They talked business. Then, somewhere amid the conversations about best business practices and social entrepreneurship, the difficult issues of…
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Students Create Their Own Charity
For many Jewish children, the idea of charity often means dropping change into a bright-blue tzedakah box. Sure, the collected money goes to charitable organizations, but how do you measure whether the kids’ own efforts have any noticeable effect? Now, one group of students is getting the opportunity to see its money at work. During…
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At Davennen’ Leadership Institute, A Chance To Deepen Spiritual Experience
Ask Rabbi Marcia Prager what a typical day at the Davennen’ Leadership Training Institute is like, and she won’t talk about the master classes, the skills sessions, the group work. Not at first. At first, she’ll start at the beginning. “We wake up as the sun is getting up, molding our lives within the prayerful…
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‘Names, Not Numbers’: Listening to the Stories Told by Holocaust Survivors
Tova Rosenberg knows about stories. Sitting in her Yeshiva University office in New York City’s Washington Heights, the creator of the Holocaust education project “Names, Not Numbers” recounted a student’s interview with the son of a Holocaust survivor. The son recalled asking his father, “Why do you survivors have all these stories?” And the father…
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View From a Bridge of Posterity
Arthur Miller: 1915–1962 By Christopher Bigsby Harvard University Press, 776 pages, $35.00. Arthur Miller is, by any measure, the most eminent and the most acclaimed Jewish playwright the world has ever seen. Most people who know his name probably would accept his greatness as a given. Yet he has been attacked vigorously: for his left-wing…
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Self-Righteous Gentiles
In the vast graveyard that is Europe, there lies a sacred plot reserved for the Weimar Republic — Germany’s bright but stillborn sanctuary for liberalism, libertinism and a host of other projected freedoms. Idealized, treated more often as an allegory than as a historical event, and celebrated as much for its exiles as for its…
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Nine Tenths of the Law
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America By Beryl Satter Metropolitan Books, 512 pages, $30.00. The search for the absent father — whether he’s literally or emotionally absent — is a pervasive theme in theater, books and film. Rarely, however, does an author inject this theme into a work of…
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Redheaded Warrior Jews
Zack Miller writes from Bryant, Texas: “In the July 31 Forward, Allan Nadler reviewed two new books about Judah Halevi’s ‘The Kuzari.” Not surprisingly, this got me to thinking about the Khazars. Could you discuss the Yiddish term di royte yidn? I first came across it in Kevin Alan Brook’s speculation that these ‘red Jews’…
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Sparks Fly in the Brandwein: Classic Klezmer for Six Strings
The Piedmont region of the Eastern United States is best known for blues, not klezmer. But acoustic guitarist Tim Sparks, a native of Winston-Salem, N.C., is throwing the weight of his background behind Jewish folk music, reinventing both the music and the guitar in the process. “Little Princess,” Sparks’s fourth album exploring Jewish music, is…
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