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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The 1-in-5 Majority
Comic strip by Eli Valley. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version. Eli Valley is finishing his first novel. His comics appear monthly in The Forward, and his website is www.evcomics.com.
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Yiddish Poetry: Up Close and Personal
With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry Edited and Translated By Richard J. Fein Host Publications, 218 pages Hardcover $35.00, Softcover $17.50. While every process of translation involves a dialogue between the work and the person rendering it into a foreign tongue, many translators go to great pains to play down that…
The Latest
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Man in Search Of Language
Readers expecting a grand symphony on how Hebrew was revived as a living language beginning in the late 19th century will be disappointed by Ilan Stavans’s “Resurrecting Hebrew.” The book deals more with Stavans’s own re-encounter with the language and its meaning for his life than with the creation of modern Hebrew in the late…
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The Great Chrismukkah Mashup
Diwon The Beat Guide to Yiddish Free to download on shemspeed.com/diwon Not for sale. Erran Baron Cohen Songs In The Key Of Hanukkah New Line Records, $12.00 Every artist remembers the first time he or she re–masters another artist’s work. The poet Ezra Pound caught his artistic stride translating traditional Japanese and Chinese poems complete…
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December 12, 2008
100 Years Ago in the Forward Released from Sing-Sing prison just a few months ago, following a long stint for robbery, 21-year-old Solomon “Nig” Stein was arrested as the main suspect in the “Harlem chloroform robberies,” in which victims were put to sleep with chloroform and then robbed. The police, having been on Stein’s trail…
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Stranger in a Strange Land
D. Nahil writes: “Although I was referred to in a blog as a sheygetz in a kind, jovial manner, I’m actually a middle-aged goy who follows the Torah and is thinking of a halakhically Orthodox conversion. What word would be used, more correctly, to describe me (again, in a jovial manner)?” If Mr. Nahil’s letter…
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Bound Up for Two Decades: A Test of Faith
Twenty years ago, young composer Lawrence Goldberg entered his one-act opera about the binding of Isaac into The Jewish Music Commission of Los Angeles’ competition for a new pulpit opera. Of the resultant piece, “A Test of Faith,” Dr. Richard Braun, chairperson of the commission, reported: “It was just the kind of piece that we hoped…
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A Prayer of One’s Own
A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book By Aliza Lavie Spiegel & Grau, 448 pages, $35. God speaks to Jewish women as well as to Jewish men. God loves Jewish women as well as God loves Jewish men. From biblical times to the present, there have been prayers that speak to this love, answer this call and…
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When a Blessing Is an Error
Four readers — Martin Flax, Gerald Weiss, Steve Oren and Gil Kulick — have written to scold me for mistakenly equating the biblical name Barak, meaning “lightning,” with the presidential name Barack in my column of October 31, which dealt with Hebrew campaign buttons in America’s recent elections. They all made the same point —…
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The Man With the Yellow Star: The Jewish Life of Serge Gainsbourg
Visitors to Paris may have noticed, in an otherwise ritzy neighborhood in the posh seventh arrondissement, a small building at 5 bis Rue d e Verneuil that is abundantly covered in garish multicolored graffiti. It is the home of the late French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991), born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris’s humble 20th arrondissement. His…
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A Rip in the Fabric of Mother
All Odd and Splendid By Hilda Raz Wesleyan University Press, 108 pages, $22.95. In the beginning, there is gender. “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl,” we say. That’s our genesis, the bedrock on which we build our selves and our lives. That’s why when the gender of someone we love shifts, our selves, lives…
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