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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An Abstract Haggadah
A decade ago, artist Archie Granot sat down to give new texture to one of the world’s oldest books. This year, his Haggadah is finally complete. Granot’s Haggadah is different from all other Haggadot in that it is composed entirely of papercuts — sheets of paper carved with a surgical scalpel and intricately layered. Granot…
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Chasing the Passover Bunny
The Passover Haggadah is jam-packed with symbols of redemption from the Egyptian enslavement. But scholars are divided over the significance of one particularly unusual symbol: rabbit hunts. These images appear mostly in Renaissance Haggadot. Even to laypeople, illustrations of hares — chased by dogs that are often accompanied by men on horseback — are curious…
The Latest
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Home for the Holidays… Or Not
I sometimes wonder what historians of the 22nd century might make of American Jewry of the 21st, especially when it comes to the ways in which the latter has chosen to mark the festival of Passover. Take, for instance, holiday-related advertisements, a wonderful source of social history. Where once ads for gefilte fish, horseradish and…
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April 18, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward “I am innocent,” Max Soifer screamed as he was led to the gallows by guards at Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison. Chanting psalms as the noose was tightened around his neck, he was executed for the murder of his lover, Annie Margolis. Soifer was convicted of shooting two bullets into Margolis’s…
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Unterzakhn, Part 6
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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Film & TV American Apparel to Woody: We’re Sorry (and We’re Parodists)
American Apparel is apologizing to Woody Allen after he filed a $10 million lawsuit against the trendy T-shirt monger for its unauthorized use of an image of him dressed in Hasidic garb on a pair of billboards. “We deeply admire Woody Allen as a filmmaker and an inspiring social and political satirist,” the company said…
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Happy Ending
The following celiac-friendly dessert recipe is from Susie Fishbein’s new cookbook, “Passover by Design” (ArtScroll Shaar Press). Lemon Meringues pareve, non-gebroktsmakes 6 servings Meringues: 2 egg whites pinch of fine sea salt ½ cup sugar, super-fine if possible ½ teaspoon vanilla extract ¼ teaspoon almond extract Lemon Cream: 1½ cups sugar ¹⁄³ cup potato starch…
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Picturing Today’s Conversos
In northern New Mexico’s Sandoval County, there is a tombstone of a World War II veteran in a cemetery nestled in the desert brush. The name of the man, who was born in 1921 and died in 1980, is Adonay P. Gutierrez, and it is engraved on the stone below a cross. Nine different Native…
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Horn of Plenty
It’s rarely wise to single out a particular group of instrumentalists — saxophonists, pianists, laptop artists — as an engine of change in a given genre. Doing so usually just means you’ll end up ignoring the vast numbers of other people doing equally interesting work. Still, some things are hard to ignore. So if I…
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Israel, in Polyethylene and Concrete
The Girl on the FridgeBy Etgar Keret Translated from the Hebrew by MiriamShlesinger and Sondra Silverston Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $12. Since its rebirth as a modern language, Hebrew has undergone a metamorphosis, from the closed but immensely rich language of sacred literature — with all the references and reverences and books within…
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Painting Apartheid’s Silhouette
William Kentridge’s tapestry, “Porter Series: Géographie des Hebreux ou Tableau de la dispersion des Enfants de Noë” (2005), shows two silhouetted figures, with their respective heads replaced by a rotary telephone and a megaphone, walking over a map of southern Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. The map mostly follows Genesis’s account of the…
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