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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Avant-garde Painter Constructs Bridges Across the Diaspora
For his 1966 painting “Kibbutz Composition,” artist José Gurvich crowded the canvas with layers of muted colors and boldly outlined images. At first, the kinetic composition tells of the artist’s zeal for kibbutz life. Look at it a little longer, and the story expands beyond the kibbutz; it moves into Latin America, where Gurvich’s hand…
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To Move or Not To Move: A Monumental Decision
Aliya: Three Generations Of American-Jewish Immigration To Israel By Liel Leibovitz St. Martin’s Press, 288 pages, $24.95. * * *| The past four centuries of American history are dominated by one overriding trend: immigration. People from every continent have, for very diverse reasons, moved in large numbers to a self-proclaimed “New World.” Although some immigrants…
The Latest
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The Persistence of Memory
The Last Jew By Yoram Kaniuk, translated by Barbara Harshav Grove Press, 544 pages, $26. * * *| To name a thing is to give it life. And to write is to name. As Adam, the first man, is referred to in Latin as prothoplastus, cognate to our protoplasm, tradition might call the last man…
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‘Memoirs of a Muse’
Novel Jews is a critically acclaimed downtown reading series that presents provocative and enlightening new fiction and literary nonfiction by today’s literary superstars and by the emerging voices of tomorrow. The event is co-sponsored by the 14th Street Y and the Forward. This month, we present Lara Vapnyar and Ilana Stanger-Ross. Lara Vapnyar emigrated from…
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Cabaret Comes Back to Life
As the 19th century drew to a close, the Jews of Eastern Europe were on the move. Fleeing oppression and searching for economic opportunity, thousands made their way to the United States in a great wave of immigration. But many others headed to Vienna, the heart of the Hapsburg Empire. They brought with them their…
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Horror Flicks
At the start of this portion, we have a continuation of the plagues, with the threat — and then the carrying out of the threat — of locusts. This is already the eighth plague. And as my ex-brother-in-law used to remark, it is much like the early scenes in horror movies, where somebody turns on…
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Elegy for a Fighter
Barney Ross By Douglas Century Nextbook (Schocken), 205 pages, $19.95. * * *| If attitudes toward Jewish boxers do not offer an all-encompassing symbol of continuing change in the social and cultural tastes of American Jewry, they probably come close. One of the many revealing anecdotes in this marvelously insightful study of the immigrant generation’s…
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The Battle Over ‘Judea and Samaria’
One would expect someone as pro-Israel as The New York Times’ William Safire to know better. In his January 16 On Language column, he wrote: “In wartime, words are weapons; we have seen how Israelis and Palestinians are highly sensitive to connotations in their conflict. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preferred to refer to land in…
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A Little Too Intimate
The Book of Trouble: A Romance By Ann Marlowe Harcourt, 288 pages, $23. * * *| As Ann Marlowe painfully illustrates in “The Book of Trouble: A Romance,” finding intimacy is not as easy as finding one’s way into someone’s pants. Just as intellectual repartee does not necessarily make for an exciting sex life, a…
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The Unity of Opposites
Learning From the Tanya: Volume Two in the Definitive Commentary On the Moral and Mystical Teachings Of a Classic Work of Kabbalah By Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Jossey-Bass, 384 pages, $24.95. * * *| We Jews: Why Are We and What Should We Do? By Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Jossey-Bass, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Why…
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Heart-to-Heart Talk
Moishe, a man of indeterminate age in doctor’s garb, stands before the massive statues of a pharaoh’s mortuary temple on the west bank at Luxor. As Amelia Edwards noted at Abu Simbel (“A Thousand Miles Up the Nile”), there is an instant at dawn as light flushes the temple that transforms the great stone colossi….
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