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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Cleveland’s Multiethnic Eden
The greening of America has assumed all sorts of forms of late, from heightened attentiveness to the kinds of foods we put on our table and the cars we drive to reusing sheets and towels while on vacation, a gesture in the direction of “conserving our country’s natural resources,” or so guests at Hilton Hotels…
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Documentarian Climbs Her Family Tree
After surviving the German occupation of Italy during the Second World War by hiding with his parents and brother and sister in the home of non-Jews, Vittorio Volterra immigrated to Israel in 1952, when he was 20 years old, and never looked back. He met his wife in Israel, and his daughter, Hava, was born…
The Latest
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András Mezei, Poet of the Horrors
András Mezei, a major poet of the Holocaust, died in his native Budapest on May 30. He was 78. As a child, Mezei survived the three-month Soviet siege of Nazi-occupied Budapest in the city’s Jewish ghetto. As a teen, he emigrated to Israel but returned to Hungary after just a year and half. He was…
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Too Dumb To Be a Thief?
Dr. Harold J. White writes: “At the beginning of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” in Vincent Hopper’s interlinear translation, I came across the line ‘A riche gnof that gestes heeld to bord,’ which Hopper renders as ‘A rich scoundrel who took in paying guests.’ Could gnof come from Hebrew/Yiddish ganef, a thief? And…
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September 5, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward A dispatch from Jerusalem indicates that much of the Ottoman-ruled Middle East is thrilled with the new revolution in Constantinople. In Beirut, for example, the city was lit up for three days as the residents partied. But the news was slower to get to Palestine, and the reaction was…
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As Olympics Near Their Close, Life in Beijing Goes On
Looking up at the sky tonight, I could see stars glittering. When I mentioned this to my neighbor, she remarked that the government must be thrilled, because stars are visible above Beijing about as often as the Olympics come to town. I told her that the local Chabad rabbi would probably appreciate the great weather,…
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Beijing’s Bagels Taste Like Brooklyn’s
It’s been two weeks since the Olympics began, and Westerners here are getting rather fed up with noodles, dumplings and rice. Even the bread here can taste strange. For Jews, or anyone who has tasted a freshly baked New York bagel, the rumors of a bagel shop in Beijing circulated around hotel lobbies, tour buses…
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For Author, Memoir Sparks New Conversation
Depending on how you look at it, Masha Gessen’s “Blood Matters” (Harcourt) is either an unusually philosophical memoir of a cancer diagnosis or an unusually personal account of the complex ethical questions surrounding the issue of genetic testing. What do we want to know, and what don’t we want to know, about our own fates?…
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Methuselah’s Children
‘It’s important to be calm, not to get excited. It’s not good for the heart,” centenarian Fred Feuerberg said. “And I never ate much. I never overate.” Feuerberg, who turned 100 in May, was sitting in his spacious apartment in Fort Lee, N.J., explaining what has allowed him to reach such a ripe old age…
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Milder Canavan Strain Opens New Possibilities
When Carly White was an infant, her parents, Jim and Dolores, noticed that she had trouble controlling the movement of her eyes. Three years later, a ballet teacher observed that Carly did not have much control over her legs. Trips to the pediatrician yielded no answers, but a visit to a neurologist ended in a…
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Bearing Jacob’s Ladder, Author Climbs the Double Helix
Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History By David B. Goldstein Yale University Press, 176 pages, $26. News articles in recent years have brought a steady stream of revelations about genetic studies of Jewish ancestry. The new data indicate that Kohanim (the “priests” among the Jews) are largely descended from a single ancient ancestor;…
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