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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‘Emil and Karl’
In 1940, famed writer Yankev Glatshteyn, best known to English readers as Jacob Glatstein, published “Emil and Karl,” a book about two friends, one Jewish and the other not, living in wartime Vienna. Intended for students at Yiddish afternoon and weekend schools, “Emil and Karl,” written in Yiddish, was one of the first books about…
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The Angel of Death Narrates a New Tale for Young Readers
The Book Thief By Markus Zusak Knopf Books for Young Readers, 552 pages, $16.95. * * *| Markus Zusak’s intensely provocative, deeply imagined and magnificently produced new novel, “The Book Thief,” concerns a group of German children who are members of the Hitler Youth during the early 1940s. We learn of their families, their tribulations,…
The Latest
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Trauma and Its Healers
Mapping Trauma and Its Wake: Autobiographic Essays By Pioneer Trauma Scholars Edited by Charles R. Figley Routledge, 272 pages, $49.95. * * *| A medical text in the “Psychosocial Stress Series” of an academic publisher would usually not interest general readers. But with aftereffects of terrorism and disaster an ongoing concern and reports surfacing of…
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Musical Tributes to Tragedy’s Victims
Music by those who perished in the Holocaust has lately enjoyed something of a vogue, with both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences discovering the work, and unfilled promise, of composers like Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Pavel Haas and Hans Krása. But what of the music written in the aftermath the Holocaust to honor the dead? Such…
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Books Roundup
Each season brings a slew of Holocaust-related books, but the spring 2006 line seems to be a particularly rich crop, including tales of personal heroism in the face of extreme danger; historical documents on Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, and even a book of poems that envisions Franz Kafka had he lived to…
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A ‘Matzo’ Mystery
We’re all eating it this week — in some cases, more than we’d like to — but why on earth do we spell it “matzo,” or “matzoh”? What Jew says, or ever did say, “mah-tso,” pronouncing the last syllable to rhyme with “oh” or “glow”? Ashkenazic Jews always have said “MAH-tse,” with the last syllable…
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Is God Just?
The portion read on the intermediate Shabbat of Pesach, Exodus 33:12-34:26, contains some of the most extraordinary passages in the Torah. Moses asks God to “show me now Thy ways, that I may know Thee” (Exodus 33:13) and gets the comforting response, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.” But…
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Looking Back April 14, 2006
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD All Jewish immigrants in New York know there are circumstances that force those in transit to remain in custody on Ellis Island for certain periods of time. Sometimes it is because they are ill, other times it is due to the fact that they do not have enough money…
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Miami Vice Versa
Saving South Beach By M. Barron Stofik University Press of Florida, 336 pages, $27.95. * * *| Miami’s South Beach neighborhood is an urban icon. Bringing new meaning to the term multicultural, South Beach is one of the only places in the United States where a twenty-something can have morning coffee with Grandma and her…
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A Crowd of Voices Covers a Folk Legend
In last year’s “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” filmmaker Lian Lunson pays homage to the man often considered the Canadian equivalent of Bob Dylan by filming a succession of performers singing Cohen’s songs, in scenes that emphasize just how beautiful his songs are when sung by someone else. When Cohen sings his own works —…
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State of Emergency: The Demise of Secularism
The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously By Jacques Berlinerblau Cambridge University Press, 232 pages, $19.99. * * *| God, it turns out, is not dead, but secularism might be — unless it deigns to take another look at itself, at God and at God’s book, and seeks to study and know what…
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Fast Forward Ye debuts ‘Heil Hitler’ music video that includes a sample of a Hitler speech
In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish קאָנצערט לכּבֿוד דעם ייִדישן שרײַבער און רעדאַקטאָר באָריס סאַנדלערConcert honoring Yiddish writer and editor Boris Sandler
דער בעל־שׂימחה האָט יאָרן לאַנג געדינט ווי דער רעדאַקטאָר פֿונעם ייִדישן פֿאָרווערטס.
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Fast Forward Trump’s new pick for surgeon general blames the Nazis for pesticides on our food
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Fast Forward Jewish feud over Trump escalates with open letter in The New York Times
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Fast Forward First American pope, Leo XIV, studied under a leader in Jewish-Catholic relations
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