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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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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What We Talk About When We Talk About God
A Touch of the Sacred: A Theologian’s Informal Guide to Jewish Belief By Eugene B. Borowitz and Frances W. Schwartz Jewish Lights Publishing, 256 pages, $21.99. A few years ago, I met a young man actively involved in the minyan movement in New York City. He was excited to tell me about how Jews of…
The Latest
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Yiddish To Ease a Worried Mind: A Forverts Scrapbook
From April to November of last year, the Museum of the City of New York featured an exhibit on the history of the Forward. When Jaime Rubin, director of medical research at Columbia University walked through the show over the summer, she realized that her family also had a contribution: her grandfather’s Forverts clippings scrapbook,…
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Retracing Columbus’s Steps and Finding a Novel Path
Claims that Christopher Columbus was Jewish have been circulating for years, though they’ve generally been confined to the rarified realms of medieval history departments and those few obsessed with the Discoveries period. Even Simon Wiesenthal believed Columbus was a Jew; in 1973, he published a book on the explorer, “Sails of Hope,” and quipped that…
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Holiday Cheer
Who better to ask about great wines for Passover than people who buy wine for a living? At the Israwinexpo 2008 in Tel Aviv, I tasted kosher wine with a diverse group of buyers for American-based retailers, including HEB Kosher Store, Best Cellars, A&P Liquor, BevMax and Skyview. Israel is emerging as a high-quality wine…
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A Kid-Friendly Seder
Purim is funny. Passover, not so much. My kids always have a hard time transitioning out of Purim, with its nutso kid-friendly awesomeness. Grandma Betsy’s chocolate hamentashen will always trump leaden macaroons and The Jellied Fruit Slices of Doom. And this year, Josie was old enough to groove along to our shul’s Purim shpiel, “The…
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My Chosen People
Last spring, I celebrated Passover at the Seward Park Housing Corporation on Grand Street in Manhattan, a few blocks from where my grandmother grew up, above her father’s tailor shop in the 1920s. While the matzo ball soup simmered on the stove, my friends and I gathered in the dining room. The only thing distinguishing…
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Food Freedom: A Celiac’s Passover Story
Tell a Jew you have celiac disease, and the response is almost always: “So like Passover, but year-round?” Yes, I reply, but without the matzo. Indeed, life with celiac disease — the autoimmune deficiency in which gluten, the proteins found in wheat, rye, oats, barley and malt, cannot be tolerated — is much like Passover…
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A Very Sweet Seder
As miracles go, it’s hard to trump the parting of the Red Sea. But there’s something miraculous about the fact that a box of chocolate truffles made in a Boston suburb and ordered by Norma and Alvin Hass near Chicago will, once again, grace the Seder table of their daughter and her family in Eagle…
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April 11, 2008
100 Years Ago in the forward The New York City Police Department is making mass arrests of anarchists and socialists on Manhattan’s Lower East Side after a bomb killed three people and injured dozens at a demonstration in Union Square last weekend. Among those killed was undercover police detective Irving Rasky, who apparently was trying…
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Of Domestic Sorceresses and Noisy Beggars
Fred Emil Katz writes from Baltimore: “I have long been struck by the fact that Yiddish has an assortment of words for incompetent men, such as shlemiel, shmegege, and shlimazel, to name just a few. The culture that produced such epithets was one in which men might spend their entire adult lives pursuing a career…
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