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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April 3, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward The world’s most beloved German-language actor, Adolf Sonenthal, has died of an apoplectic fit in Prague at the age of 75. Born in Budapest to a family of Jewish fabric merchants, Sonenthal grew up in that city’s Jewish quarter. Although he received a good education, Sonenthal was drawn to…
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David Roskies on Making the "Language of Jewish Secrets" Young Again
Author and Yiddish scholar David Roskies is out with a memoir that looks at his family’s transmission of Yiddish culture from the Old World of Vilnius to the New World of Montreal and New York. “Yiddishlands” (Wayne State University Press) takes readers on a journey through Eastern Europe, where Roskies’s grandparents owned a printing press…
The Latest
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Music That Saves?
Birkenau, known as the death camp of Auschwitz, was one of the few camps where music accompanied mass murder. For 54 women who knew how to play instruments, music was a life saver. The Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau was the only such orchestra commissioned by the SS during World War II. The women played for…
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Pale Dreadlock Sabra
When I ask Idan Raichel, leader of the triple-platinum musical phenomenon The Idan Raichel Project, where he sees himself 10 years from now, he doesn’t divulge plans for future world (musical) domination. He doesn’t talk about how it’s entirely possible that by that point, he’ll have reached the level of international renown of a Paul…
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With Schisgal, the Old is New Again
Murray Schisgal was one of the first and most celebrated “black comedy” playwrights of the 1960s and ’70s. He (and other men, largely Jewish and first-generation American) wrote tough, elegant — and, for the day, satirical — comedies about sexual and other struggles in a vibrant, decaying New York. His 1964 play, “Luv,” in which…
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Social Entrepreneurs Lost In Space
In Eli Valley’s latest comic, the world’s best and the brightest Jewish “social entrepreneurs” are sent into space, just as an asteroid heads for Earth. Click on the thumbnail 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…
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Selling National Socialism
A series of photographs depicts Hitler practicing before a speech, his hands shooting above his head, and his face working into a fiery froth, packing menace into a small frame. It’s enough simply to see him; hearing him is almost beside the point. Hitler meticulously plotted almost every detail of the Nazi publicity campaign, and…
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The Other Side of Silence: Listening Into the Bible
The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious By Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg Schocken Books, 480 pages, $27.95. Virginia Woolf famously said that George Eliot’s novel “Middlemarch” was one of the few English novels “written for grown-up people.” “The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious,” Avivah Zornberg’s new study of the biblical unconscious is, likewise,…
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To Have and To Have Not: An Et Hater at Heart
Jack Zeldis writes from Fresno, Calif., about the verb “to have” — or rather, about the lack of it — in Hebrew. Specifically, he asks me to comment on the two kinds of constructions for a Hebrew sentence like “I have the book”: the “correct” one of “Yesh li ha-sefer,” *which you will almost never…
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March 27, 2009
100 Years Ago in the forward Only about five years ago, Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx was a beautiful, dreamy, Garden of Eden of a street, populated by little wooden houses and surrounded by beautiful trees. The street’s residents were no doubt shocked by how quickly their neighborhood changed when the Jews began moving in….
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Avivah Zornberg and the ‘Biblical Unconscious’
Dr. Avivah Zornberg is a Jerusalem-based educator, Torah scholar, and philosopher. Her weekly lectures on the current Torah portion have an impressive following — bringing together, among others, rabbinical students of all denominations, artists and professors. Her lectures, like her books, are a sophisticated mix of traditional Jewish exegesis, Hasidic texts, Western philosophy, poetry and…
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