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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Disraeli, Please Come Home
Benjamin Disraeli By Adam Kirsch Schocken/Nextbook, 288 pages, $21. Queen Victoria once asked Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, about his “real” religion. “You were born a Jew and you forsook your great people,” she said. “Now you are a member of the Church of England, but no one believes that you are a…
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A Wife, Down and Out in Berlin
This Must Be the Place By Anna Winger Riverhead Books, 303 pages, $24.95. Days after moving to Berlin from Brooklyn this summer, I fell into a deep funk. It was the kind of can’t-get-out-of-bed depression where at 5 p.m. you realize that you haven’t left the apartment all day — except once, and that was…
The Latest
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The Christian Soldiers of the Holy City
Knights of Jerusalem: The Crusading Order of Hospitallers, 1100-1565 By David Nicolle Osprey Publishing, 224 pages, $25.95. They began as a charitable organization, a brotherhood charged with caring for Jerusalem’s indigent pilgrims before the First Crusade. They ended the Crusades as warlords, infamous for their violence and greed. This role reversal would seem to be…
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Art That Is at Once Lush and Spare
As a graphic artist, Mark Podwal has long been taken with ritual and mysticism, mythology and superstition, angels and magic — particularly as these implicate and influence Jewish tradition via midrash and Kabbalah. Jewish folk beliefs are central to his work. But to Podwal, folk traditions are a vehicle in a larger enterprise: nothing less…
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A Step-by-Step Guide to Peace in Israel
The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last By Bernard Avishai Harcourt, 304 pages, $26. The old adage notwithstanding, everyone judges a book by its cover. When the cover features a subtitle that promises to tell us how lasting peace can be achieved for Israel, the skeptical reader…
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Versatile Dutch Author Fills an Important Gap
As a young Dutch Jew growing up as part of an Orthodox Jewish family in southern Holland in the 1960s, Leon de Winter turned to Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer to understand post-Holocaust Europe. Kafka’s feeling of “seasickness on dry land,” combined with Singer’s “Every human being, even if he is an idiot, is…
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Don’t Worry About a Maverick in This Campaign
Although I try to keep this a Jewish-language column, sometimes a question is asked of me that offers a pretext for sneaking in an outside issue. Such is a letter I recently received from David H. Margulies of Bethesda, Md. Mr. Margulies writes: “Contemporary political rhetoric has driven me to explore the origin and meaning…
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September 26, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward In the wake of New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham’s accusation that Jews commit the majority of crime in the city, the Forward received a letter from an actual thief who is currently imprisoned in “The Tombs.” The imprisoned man’s friends brought him copies of the Forward, and…
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Between Two Cultures: In Jerusalem, a Breakthrough Show of Works by Arab-Israelis
Opening a new exhibition of Arab Israeli art in Jerusalem — the first of its kind at any Israeli museum — are three etchings from the 1970s by Walid Abu-Shakra. At first glance they appear to be simple etchings of a village landscape: desolate and dry, absent of humans, perhaps the remains of an evacuated…
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God of Judgment, God of Love
As the season of repentance approaches, our Jay Michaelson offers some thoughts on the meaning of judgment, forgiveness and love, and how to think of the Infinite to whom the new year’s prayers will be directed. Every year at this time, for at least the past decade, I have struggled with the theology of atonement,…
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Trembling Before Allah
One year after the release of “Trembling Before G-d,” the iconic documentary on Orthodox Jewish gay men and lesbians, filmmaker Sandi DuBowski embarked on a project that was both deeply similar and utterly different from his first undertaking. In 2002, DuBowski agreed to produce “A Jihad for Love,” which would explore the plight of gays…
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