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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Looking Back June 2, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD It’s a known fact that many young sweatshop workers are terribly jealous of Singer sewing machine agents, who make good money, are well dressed and perform work that doesn’t seem very strenuous. But the reality is that they are enslaved to the company. Though it seems like they’re partners,…
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Searching for Answers, After the Fire
Triangle By Katharine Weber Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $23. * * *| ‘Triangle” is a prose cousin of certain one-act plays, those taut dramatic exercises in which just a few characters, engaging in conversation, conjure grand notions. (Think of “No Exit,” “Waiting for Godot,” “Doubt.”) At its best, Katharine Weber’s new novel has…
The Latest
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A Very Special Episode: ‘Everwood’ Series Finale Has the Rite Stuff
The fictional television town of Everwood, Colo., has no synagogue and no rabbi, not even a fictional one. Its leading citizen is played by the palpably WASPy Treat Williams, and its network — The WB — gave birth to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Beauty and the Geek.” So it might be the last place,…
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Good Guys and Bad Guys
Who are the good guys? That’s what every well-meaning European, left-wing European, intellectual European, liberal European always wants to know, first and foremost. Who are the good guys in the film and who are the bad guys. In this respect Vietnam was easy: The Vietnamese people were the victims, and the Americans were the bad…
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Our Own Superhero: A Matter of Pryde
Bar mitzvah boys can be divided, if you crunch the dataset right, into two groups: those who wished over their bar mitzvah cakes for superpowers, and those who wished to meet their favorite girl with superpowers: Kitty Pryde. Granted this might be limited to the subset of bar mitzvah boys who know what a dataset…
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A Mosaic of Jewish Music in America
The old Woody Allen joke about a book of great Jewish athletes — it’s more of a pamphlet, really — wouldn’t work with great Jewish composers. So when pianists Joel Sachs and Cheryl Seltzer, co-directors of the new music ensemble CONTINUUM, decided to present a program of works by modern American Jewish composers last month…
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Shelumiel — The First Schlemiel?
In the German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem, a leafy residential lane bears the name Yitzhak Crémieux Street. If that name sounds only half-familiar, perhaps the name Adolphe Crémieux rings a louder bell? A prominent Jewish political figure in 19th-century France, Crémieux combined a long career in elective office with service to the Jewish community, including…
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Looking Back May 26, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD New York City’s East Side Pushcart Peddlers Association held meetings this week to protest the unjust way in which Jewish pushcart peddlers are being treated. They say that Jewish peddlers who request licenses are frequently turned away, whereas Christian peddlers get their licenses without a fuss. In addition, there…
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In Defense of the (High) Art of Writing
The Din in the Head By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $24. * * *| It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that any person in possession of a large personal library will covet, if he or she does not already own, essays written by Cynthia Ozick. Why? Because Ozick’s paragraphs contain equal measures…
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Amid the Smokestacks, An American Dream
Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA By Bathsheba Monk Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pages, $22. * * *| Cokesville, Pa., is a gritty fictional American shtetl. It is populated by Polish-Catholic émigrés and anchored by the steel mills in which they are employed. It is a place both defined and defeated by…
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Rivalry In the Time Of Cholera
An Imperfect Lens By Anne Roiphe Shaye Areheart Books, 304 pages, $25. * * *| Disease, horrifying as it can be in real life, usually makes for a good read — gripping, intense, fearful and always entertaining. Veteran novelist Anne Roiphe’s latest book, “An Imperfect Lens,” is a riveting work of historical fiction, taking the…
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