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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Jews Sail Toward Medals in Qingdao
Jo Aleh is used to standing out from the crowd. She is the top-ranked New Zealand female in her one-woman sailing event, and number four in the world. And being the daughter of an Israeli father and Kiwi mother who made aliyah, Aleh is also the only Jewish athlete on the Kiwi Olympic team, and…
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Hitting the Olympic Mat, Jewish Wrestler Finds Victory in Defeat
Yesterday, I watched Ari Taub, a 37-year-old Jewish lawyer from Canada, take on a worthy opponent and 16 years of personal demons in the 120-kilogram category Greco-Roman wrestling competition at the Chinese Agricultural University Gym. While Taub was eliminated after losing his first match 2-1, 4-1 to Mihaly Deak-Bardos of Hungary, his Sisyphean journey to…
The Latest
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Viewing School Through a Biblical Lens
A visitor to the Deutsche Gug-genheim Berlin’s new show of contemporary American art, Freeway Balconies, might be taken aback by the exhibition’s first piece: a luminous black-and-white photograph of a yarmulke-clad boy interacting familiarly with a girl who’s wearing a long skirt. The caption reads: “The Garden of Eden.” The photo is one of four…
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Celebrating Remembrance
Yizkor, the memorial service chanted but four times in the course of the Jewish year, was composed in the wake of the Crusades, nearly 1,000 years ago. The spirit that spurred its creation has long since vanished. Undaunted, bassist David Chevan has tried to recapture it. Together with his band, the Afro-Semitic Experience, and renowned…
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Just Say ‘Nu?’: Bottoms Up!
FOOD AND DRINK, PART 4 Alcohol It’s a case of life imitating rhetoric. The original meaning of the phrase “Jews don’t drink” was not that Jews abstain. It didn’t even mean that Jews don’t get drunk. It meant that Jews don’t stay drunk: they don’t drink to the exclusion of all else, and such drinking…
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Revisiting the Early Days of the Nazi Comedy
Exactly how popular culture has grappled with Nazism over the past 60-odd years forms a peculiar sort of curve. In films, the trajectory began with stock-villain propaganda and then evolved (in the 1950s and ’60s) toward a defensive, Jewish-comic sardonicism, which found itself capable of using the German fascism as farce. This abated in the…
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Studying the Results of the ‘Year in Israel’
Flipping Out? Myth or Fact: The Impact of the ‘Year in Israel’ By Shalom Berger, Daniel Jacobson and Chaim Waxman Yashar Books, 235 pages, $24.95. Since the 1980s, it has become the norm in the Modern Orthodox community for high-school graduates to spend a year studying in yeshivas in Israel. More than 1,000 American 18-year-olds…
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Getting Chummy
‘Livni mitkasha lihyot sah.bakit,” said a headline in a Hebrew paper the other day. The subject of the headline was Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, now running in a primary contest to replace Ehud Olmert as head of Kadima, the ruling party in the country’s parliamentary coalition. Livni, who is known for her polite but…
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Jewish Schools Feel the Pinch
By all accounts, Isaac Bitton had a pretty good summer in 2007. As owner of the commercial company Apex Suspended Ceilings, he was making enough money to live a comfortable life with his wife and three kids in suburban Los Angeles, and had just opened a new business installing swimming pools in residential properties. As…
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Language Educators Rethink Their Hebrew Lessons
Rachel Jackson doesn’t remember learning Hebrew at the Jewish Community Day School, where she spent kindergarten through eighth grade, but something must have stuck: She’s now among the top Hebrew-language students at her Jewish high school. “Things I learned at JCDS, I don’t remember learning, because they seemed to come naturally,” Jackson said. Perhaps that’s…
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New Egalitarian Yeshiva Prepares To Go Full Time
On a recent weekday summer morning on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the second floor of West End Synagogue was buzzing. Thirty-six students, divided into pairs, clustered around tables, poring over open Talmuds. Some of the beginners flipped through lexicons, trying to puzzle out obscure words, while more advanced students debated that day’s text and compared…
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