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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If it’s Sukkot, it’s rollercoaster time all over America — a pulse-pounding thrill ride of a photo essay
Sukkot is one of Judaism’s three pilgrimage festivals, when our ancestors trekked to the temples in Jerusalem to make sacrifices. Now, many Orthodox Jews in the New York area make a different sort of holiday pilgrimage — to amusement parks. During the week-long holiday’s intermediate days, known as chol hamoed, restrictions on work, driving and…
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Though it looked to the past, ‘Hester Street’ was way ahead of its time
Joan Micklin Silver's film was an indie long before the heyday of independent cinema
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How these intimate family photos helped to bridge a Trump-era divide
When Donald Trump was inaugurated, Gillian Laub was with her parents in Washington D.C. “Well, not with them,” Laub says. Her parents were Trump fans there to make America great again. Laub was there to photograph the Women’s March that took place the day after inauguration. But while she was in D.C., Laub also took…
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Disturbingly bigoted and irredeemably misogynistic? How will future readers view Philip Roth?
The Philip Roth We Don’t Know: Sex, Race, and Autobiography By Jacques Berlinerblau University of Virginia Press, 208 pp, $29.95 According to an old joke, the Lone Ranger and his trusty sidekick Tonto find themselves surrounded. “We are going to die,” the Lone Ranger says, to which Tonto replies: “What do you mean ‘we?’” Though…
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Netflix’s Holocaust revenge drama changes the facts – is nationalism to blame, or just an actor’s mistake?
As villains go, you can’t do much better than the one at the center of Netflix’s latest, a man called “Doctor Death.” In “Jaguar,” a crew of Spanish Holocaust survivors in 1960s Madrid hunt down Aribert Heim, a real-life Nazi physician who escaped justice for nearly half a century. “He was a doctor at Mauthausen,”…
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How two visionary Jewish nightclub owners changed the face of entertainment
From the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, Mr. Kelly’s — a nightclub on Rush Street in Chicago — was a new kind of entertainment venue. Intimate (just 200 seats) and relatively inexpensive, it merged a range of programs, including jazz and stand-up comedy, on the same program. Mr. Kelly’s helped to launch the careers of…
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At a Jewish chicken farm, Sukkot is a time for homemade pesto, random dancing, and making friends with strangers
If you arrived at Linke Fligl around 3 p.m. last Sunday and ambled into the tall grassy meadow at the heart of the farm, you would have seen something curious: A bunch of Jews squatting in patches of goldenrod, counting their blessings. They — or rather we, since I was among them — were saying…
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Art Now in English, an almost-forgotten story by Sholem Aleichem
We know the usual occupations in Sholom Aleichem’s fiction: dairyman, butcher, tailor. But did you hear the one about pickpockets (or “nimble fingers”), robbers (“snatchers”) and horse thieves? If not, don’t worry — most haven’t. As far as we know, Sholom Aleichem, the beloved Yiddish author best-remembered for his Tevye stories, only wrote about such…
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Is Facebook biased against Palestinians?
During the most recent Gaza conflagration, both Israelis and Palestinians hurled accusations of censorship at social media giants, including Facebook and Instagram. Palestinians said that their posts about Israeli soldiers entering the al-Aqsa mosque complex in Jerusalem were disappearing without even a warning, and so were other posts accusing Israel of violence. Meanwhile, Israeli influencers…
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Why Jewish compassion shouldn’t just apply to human animals
Marc Bekoff, an American Jewish biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has studied coyotes, dogs, penguins, fish, grosbeaks, and jays to understand their thoughts and emotions from a perspective of interdependence akin to the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s “I and Thou.” Benjamin Ivry spoke to Bekoff from his home in…
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On an artist’s journey of discovery, embracing mythology while rejecting the bible
At an exhibit titled “Personal Mythology” by an Israeli artist, you’d expect to see some biblical references — perhaps an apple tree, or King David with his harp. But there aren’t any; Tarot cards, witches and alchemical creatures populate Ranei Mazor’s sculptures and dioramas. “I have a very good history and record with the stories…
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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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Culture Trump wants to honor Hannah Arendt in a ‘Garden of American Heroes.’ Is this a joke?
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Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
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Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
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Fast Forward David Horowitz, ’60s radical turned right-wing firebrand and critic of Islam, dies at 86
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