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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Do Jews Have a Jesus Problem?
The joke, if that’s what it is, goes like this: “You’ll have to forgive us Jews for being a little nervous. Two thousand years of Christian love have worn down our nerves.” That says it all, doesn’t it? The scars of antisemitism and missionary activity, the pathos-drenched sense of humor, the contempt for Christianity —…
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Crafting Beauty From Despair: Violins of Hope
Soon after landing in Tel Aviv a few years ago, I found myself in the atelier of Amnon Weinstein, a renowned violin maker on Shlomo Hamelech Street. I had come to Israel in search of Jewish partisans, those exceptional individuals who had not only risen up against Hitler in Eastern Europe, but also, soon afterward,…
The Latest
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And Then There Was “And”
And Poems by Michael Blumenthal BOA Editions, Ltd.,112 pages, $16.00. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith poet Michael Blumenthal. Well, in fact, he nearly saith that. Not quite, but almost. Blumenthal’s new collection of poems, titled “And,” is the closest that the stoicism of Ecclesiastes will come to getting a 21st-century makeover. In it,…
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Sol LeWitt: A Jewish Artist’s Leap Into the Unknown
American Jewish artist Sol LeWitt, recognized as a pioneer in conceptual art and Minimalism, died of cancer two years ago, yet he is as present as ever on today’s museum scene. LeWitt opined in a 1967 issue of Artforum that the “idea or the concept is the most important aspect” of his art, and that…
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Alack and Alas, We’ve Lost Our Glottal Stop
Andy Farber of Terre Haute, Ind., writes to ask, “What does zuchem vey mean?” “Zuchem vey” means nothing that I know of. But what Mr. Farber has undoubtedly heard is a slight garbling of Yiddish *s’iz okh un vey, *an expression that is easy to understand but not so easy to translate into contemporary English….
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May 8, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Oy, if only Mendel Weinstock had taken our advice, everything probably would be okay. Not long ago, 19-year-old Weinstock opined, in a letter to our Bintel Brief advice column, that he had ended up in the hospital as a result of a love affair gone bad. According to the…
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House of Cards
Erin Einhorn’s family folklore reads like delectable fiction. Her grandfather leapt from a moving train bound for a concentration camp to save her mother — then a child — who was hidden by five people in three countries by the time she was 9. In 1945, Einhorn’s grandfather invited a Polish family, the Skowronkis, to…
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Describing a Scribe
On an immediate level, illustrator Arthur Szyk’s (1894–1951) “The Scribe,” painted during his late twenties in Paris, is a confident display of technical mastery. Here’s a young artist who can do ornate, Renaissance illuminations; he can also give you Picasso’s abstraction. Actually, he can give you both at once. This painting, as it turns out,…
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A Utopian Bronx Tale
In the mid-1920s, a group of immigrant Jewish factory workers decided that they’d come this far for something better than the slums they inhabited. So pooling resources, they orchestrated the construction of four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx, with practical goals for a better quality of life, and idealistic visions of…
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LABA and the Ripple Effect
As an eclectic roster of Jewish artists takes the stage at a new multimedia festival in early May, a bold new experiment aimed at transforming how Jewish communities connect with culture (and culture makers) will also enter the spotlight. From “absurdist rock cabaret” to giant sculptures to a “contact improvisation” workshop cheekily called “The Meating,”…
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Sunny Side Down
Sunnyside By Glen David Gold Knopf, 576 pages, $26.95. Perhaps you’ll know where I am going with this review if I begin by saying that Glen David Gold’s last book was splendid. So many fiction writers begin small, writing about what they know, etching a fine portrait of a particular and familiar time and place,…
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