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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A Sweet Passover for All
Forward reader Benzion Ginn is seeking information about the origins of the Yiddish expression a zisn Pesach, “[Have] a sweet Pesach,” as a Passover or pre-Passover greeting. Wondering whether such a greeting is traditional or whether it is rather a modern American invention of “Passover food providers, such as Manischewitz,” Mr. Ginn writes that he…
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Koch on Koch on Antisemitism
“A liberal,” Robert Frost once quipped, “is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Ed Koch is not that kind of liberal. The legendary former New York City mayor — who puckishly describes himself as “a liberal with sanity” — has never been shy about standing up for his fellow…
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Film & TV Woody Allen in Eilat?
Israeli news site Y-Net reports that Woody Allen is expected to go to to the Israeli Red Sea resort town of Eilat for its film festival. The thought of the consummate New York nebbish in Eilat brings to mind that scene in “”Annie Hall” of a very uncomfortable Woody Allen in sunny Southern California. I…
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Unterzakhn, Part 7
Read this week’s installment of Leela Corman’s new graphic novel, “Unterzakhn,” which is being serialized in the Forward. (Or, to start at the very beginning, click here). CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW
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Whither Macedonia?
I don’t know how many of you have been following the dispute between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia — or, as it is still officially known by the United Nations, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) — over the name “Macedonia.” The latest installment is the Greek government’s threat to veto FYROM’s acceptance…
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Epic Encyclopedia Turns a Page in Study of Jewish Eastern Europe
What is Jewish Eastern Europe? A geographical space, or a frame of mind? The eternal homeland of Ashkenazic Jewry, or simply its birthplace? A field of academic inquiry, or just a touchstone for nostalgia? For the editors of the comprehensive new YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, capturing di alter heym — the Old…
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A Sad, Searching Soul
The Life of Jews in Poland Before the Holocaust By Ben-Zion Gold University of Nebraska Press, 154 pages, $21.95. Among its many gifts, Ben-Zion Gold’s modest and moving chronicle of a Hasidic boy coming of age in pre-Holocaust Poland affords readers a bracing reprieve from the cynicism generated by a recent plague of phony, self-aggrandizing…
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New Fame for Israel’s ‘National Artist’
At Sotheby’s most recent auction of Israeli and international art, an annual event held in New York each December, Reuven Rubin accounted for six of the top 10 lots, led by “The Big Bouquet,” a large 1963-64 painting of flowers on a windowsill. The work fetched slightly more than its $200,000 to $300,000 estimate. Although…
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Agnon’s Recurring Nightmare
To This Day S.Y. Agnon Translated from the Hebrew, and with an introduction, by Hillel Halkin The Toby Press, 188 pages, $24.95. Reader, I would like to offer a brief and abridged history of Recurrence in the arts. I want to make this survey — progressing from the Romantic rewriting of folklore through Existentialism, to…
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My Authentic Selves
The End of the Jews By Adam Mansbach Spiegel & Graus, 320 pages, $23.95. In his new novel, “The End of the Jews,” Adam Mansbach, author of “Angry White Boy” and “Shackling Water,” uses a rare, time-jumping sort of hipness. He integrates the edgy present of a Jewish boy who finds meaning in hip-hop with…
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Four Questions for Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, the brilliant young sage from the generation following the Second Temple’s destruction, likened himself to “a man of 70” in the Passover Haggadah. If ben Azariah were alive today, his role model for wisdom might very well be Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz. At 70, the indefatigable Steinsaltz — renowned Jerusalem scholar,…
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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
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Culture Cardinals are Catholic, not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?
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Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
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