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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Where On Earth Is Our Chicken Soup?
[ ![][2]][2] We’ve been patient for a long time, but we’re just about at our limit. Enough with the excuses. Would you please tell us why we don’t have our bowls of matza ball soup? It’s a bit too much to take after all our people have been through. First, slavery in Egypt. Then the…
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Letters
[ ![][2]][2] Thank You, Backward! Dear Backward, Thank you so much for your insightful, independent and comprehensive coverage of all things Jewish. It’s really nice to have a critical look at the community for once. I look forward to my weekends when I can kick back, relax and read my paper just the way my…
The Latest
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Going Gaga For Batsheva in America
Since its first tour of the United States in 1970, Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company has won over American crowds and critics alike with its energetic approach to dance. At the time, it was, perhaps, a novelty: an Israeli group performing primarily American repertory with unbridled verve and vigor. But in the past 18 years, the…
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The Mightiest Stories Ever Told
On or about March 13, 1929, readers of The New York Times were informed that Noah’s Ark had taken Broadway by storm. Those who had not yet had their morning coffee must have taken the news quite literally, especially since it was accompanied by a two-page spread that featured an enormous boat washed up amid…
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It’s a Purim World Out There
Purim has always been a weightier holiday than it seems — precisely because it is the lightest. Unbearably light, to paraphrase Kundera: Purim’s message is that there is no anchor, that all is random, that carnival is real and there is nothing you can do about it. Or, to paraphrase the late and beloved Rabbi…
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Miklós Radnóti: Bearer of Poetic Witness
Miklós Radnóti (1909–1944) was arguably the greatest poet of the Holocaust. He stands out among the other great figures of the Holocaust literature of his generation because he dedicated his life — his talent, discipline, loves and learning, and even his fate in the Holocaust — to the craft of writing poetry. Unlike many others,…
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Furious Responsibilities
The Kindly Ones By Jonathan Littell, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell *HarperCollins, 992 pages, $29.99. * *‘But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did….. If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your…
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Chosen, Us?
The Jews as a Chosen People By S. Leyla Gurkan Routledge, 246 pages, $140.00. The Chosen: The History of an Idea, the Anatomy of an Obsession By Avi Beker Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $35.00. Who Are the Real Chosen People? By Reuven Firestone Skylight Paths Publishing, 158 pages, $21.99. Here’s an obvious statement: The doctrine…
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‘The Beginning’
One of the great Russian writers of the 20th century, Isaac Babel was born in Odessa to middle-class Jewish parents in 1894. In his classic “Red Cavalry,” he writes about how he rode with Cossacks in their Polish campaign; and in his comic Odessa stories, he depicts the Damon Runyon-like Jewish gangsters of Odessa’s Moldavanka…
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Rhyming Life and Fiction
Rhyming Life & Death By Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange *Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 128 pages, $23.00. * Readers who last encountered Amos Oz in “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” his elegiac and often somber memoir, may be taken aback by the literary sleight of hand he performs in this highly entertaining short…
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Faith in a Barren Land
The Believers By Zoë Heller HarperCollins, 352 pages, $25.99. In her new novel, the British-born and, for the past 20 years, New York-based novelist and cultural critic Zoë Heller (her last novel, “Notes on a Scandal” (2003 was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in England and made into a popular film starring Judi Dench…
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