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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Foundation To Send Hebrew School Teachers to Israel
Phyllis Osher, who has been teaching Hebrew school students about Israel for years, has not been there herself since 1982. That will change in August, when Osher goes to Israel on a new program of the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, which will pay for 40 Hebrew and pre-school teachers to go to Israel for…
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Holocaust Curriculum Shines Spotlight on Resistance
New Jersey mandated Holocaust education in its public schools more than a decade ago. But until now, something has been missing. The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education recommended last summer that teachers add a new subject to the standard curriculum about the Shoah: Jewish partisan fighters. Although individual teachers may have broached the subject…
The Latest
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Coincidentally Israeli Designers
To classify art based on geographical origin is to play a silly game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The Guggenheim exhibit The Aztec Empire recently showed the dangers of national taxonomies by including works of the Toltecs — whom the Aztecs sacrificed to their gods — and of the Olmecs, who are to…
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Photographer Puts the Whole Jewish World in Focus
Zion Ozeri has made his living photographing Jews all over the world, from the mountains of Yemen to the streets of New York to the jungles of Peru. He has exhibited his work in galleries and museums and has published his photographs in newspapers, books and magazines. And now, Ozeri is bringing his work to…
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Minors in Jewish Studies Make Major Gains
That explains how minor programs became possible, but there’s still the question of motivation: Why would a Catholic school set up a Jewish studies program? “It is part of the aspiration of Catholic colleges to be great colleges,” Fisher told the Forward. “Excellent colleges have Jewish studies; you can’t teach Western civilization without it.” The…
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Celebrating a Composer Who Celebrates Multiple Cultures
Composer Osvaldo Golijov is being celebrated at New York City’s Lincoln Center with a month-long series of performances of his works, titled The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov. Musical America named Golijov composer of the year. His latest release, “Ayre” — based on traditional songs and poems in Ladino, Arabic and Hebrew — evokes the period…
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Adults Explore Faith in Holocaust Class
In the face of injustice and suffering, can one believe in God? Why do bad things happen to good people? How can civilized people torture and murder? In 160 cities around the world, students recently explored these questions in “Beyond Never Again,” a new adult education course about the Holocaust. Chabad’s Jewish Learning Institute offers…
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Orthodox Rethinking Campus Outreach
Following on the heels of Chabad-Lubavitch’s successful campus programs, other Orthodox groups are now reaching out in new ways to college students of every Jewish denomination. Non-Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox Jews — or mitnagdim — have adopted an approach that is startlingly similar to the one presented by Chabad, the Hasidic sect whose outreach efforts have made…
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Survivor Uses Her Life as a Teaching Tool
Ice cream is what Gerda Weissmann Klein remembers most about birthdays during her youth in Bielsko, Poland. In those days, ice cream was made by hand only in the summer, and every year Klein’s mother made the first batch of the season in her honor. By early May, the lilacs were in bloom, but a…
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Deli Maker Finds Delicious Way To Raise Funds
The heads of Abeles & Heymann Gourmet Kosher Provisions are thinking about hot dogs in a whole new way. Concerned about the rising costs of education at Jewish day schools, A&H co-presidents Seth Leavitt and David Flamholz have decided to take action. They recently launched A&H for ABCs, a yearlong initiative in which a percentage…
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A Babel Biographer Chases His Moving Target
Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel By Jerome Charyn Random House, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Isaac Babel was an iconoclast whose small, mysterious oeuvre, delivered in a deft, compact Russian shaped at a time of revolution, becomes more alluring with the passage of time. As Jerome Charyn puts it in…
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