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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Across the Boundaries of Language
Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature By Hana Wirth-Nesher Princeton University Press, 256 pages, $39.50. * * *| As we enter a world that will forever remain “multicultural,” the borders of our languages have become easier than ever to cross. Paradoxically, to understand all of what is said and what is written…
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The Poetry of Mature Experience
The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems By Harvey Shapiro Wesleyan University Press, 288 pages, $29.95. * * *| In his mother’s recollection, Harvey Shapiro’s first words were in Yiddish. Born in 1924 to an observant Jewish family, he lived as a child first on the Lower East Side, then high enough up…
The Latest
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A Gem Among Giants
Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time (Lives in Music Series No. 8) By Phillip Ramey Pendragon Press, 334 pages, $32. * * *| Flip to the back of Phillip Ramey’s“Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time,” and you’ll find a clue as to why Fine, once a major figure in American art…
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Offerings of the Willing Heart
The second half of Exodus is largely concerned with the construction of the tabernacle. For me, the most evocative aspect of all the detailed descriptions is this: And Moses spoke to all the congregation of the children of Israel, saying: “This is the thing which the Lord commanded, saying: Take from among you an offering…
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Sex, Lies and the German Occupation
The Mercy Room By Gilles Rozier Little, Brown and Company, 192 pages. $22.95. * * *| The scaffolding of Gilles Rozier’s taut, affecting novel, “The Mercy Room,” has all the makings of a Sunday evening television melodrama. The scene: a small town in France during the German Occupation. The hero and narrator: a French Christian…
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Revisiting the Work of the First Emancipated German Jewish Artist
When Max Liebermann premiered “The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple With the Scholars” — a historical painting based on the New Testament’s description of Jesus Christ debating with the rabbis in Jerusalem — at the 1879 Munich International Art Fair, the work was assailed by German critics. What right, after all, did a Jewish artist…
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A Texan Cantor Infuses Jewish Music With New Orleans Flavor
Austin, Texas, bills itself as the live-music capital of the world. But in a city usually known for its rock beat and country twang, Cantor Neil Blumofe has begun an exploration of Jewish music and themes played in a jazz idiom. His new CD, “Piety and Desire” — released on Valentine’s Day — looks at…
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Jerry Lewis at 80
This may be hard to believe, but Jerry Lewis turns 80 on March 16. For more than 60 years, Lewis has loomed in our collective pop culture imagination as the perpetual “kid,” the 9-year-old “nudnik” to America: carrying on, driving us crazy, making us laugh — and wince. Whether you love or hate Lewis —…
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The Shadow That Never Went Away
Yaacov Herzog: A Biography By Michael Bar-Zohar Gardners Books, 384 pages, $27.10 * * *| If the Oedipal complex didn’t exist, we might have to invent it to explain the frustrated, stunted career of Yaacov Herzog. A shadow hovered over him from the day he was born — his father, Isaac Halevi Herzog, was the…
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Skilled Craftsmen
Urim and Thummim. The ineffable name of God was inscribed on some unknown material and placed in the fold of the breastplate. — Soncino Chumash —So what we’re making is the breastplate, the ephod…. —What’s an ephod? —Like the linen apron you hang the breastplate over…? —Oh, right. —… the robe, tunic, mitre and a…
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What Makes Ari Run
Ari Gold, the smarmy 10-percenter who pulls the strings of HBO’s Hollywood send-up “Entourage,” has it all: degrees from Harvard and Michigan Law, a former-actress wife, a $3 million house in one of the hillier enclaves of West Los Angeles, a full head of hair and a conveniently malleable sense of ethics. He is the…
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