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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The Secret Jewish History Of U2
While U2 is still largely considered one of, if not the greatest rock band in the world, the group’s singer and frontman, Bono, is not quite the beloved figure he was when the band first exploded on the scene in the mid-1980s. His hobnobbing with world and corporate leaders is very un-rock ’n’ roll, and…
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How TikTok’s #MyJewishHeritage plan went horribly awry
Editor’s note: This story was updated on Tuesday, May 11 to include a statement from a TikTok spokesperson. Going viral overnight is the dream for most aspiring social media influencers. But for Jewish creators on TikTok, it can be a nightmare filled with antisemitism. For May, which is Jewish Heritage Month, TikTok created a #MyJewishHeritage…
The Latest
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Books Her name is Ozick, look on her works, ye mighty, and despair
Antiquities By Cynthia Ozick Knopf, 192 pages, $21.00 Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” proposes a remarkable idea: That after death, we get to re-experience a single day from our lives — just one perfectly ordinary day. It’s a painful, startling scenario, a striking conclusion to a complicated existence. “I can’t look at everything hard…
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Books How Jewish New York got its very un-Jewish names
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro asked me to meet him on Frieda Zames Way, which is not an easy place to find on Google Maps. No street view photos, no subway wait times — nothing to feed our iPhone-era inclination to know exactly where we’re going, all the time. As any serious investigative journalist would, I immediately turned…
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Why Jews are key to Chinatown’s survival
My last indoor dining experience of 2020 was in early March. I had crispy roast duck, watercress and assorted dumplings at Wu’s Wonton King, at the junction of Chinatown and the historic Jewish Lower East Side. Located at the foot of the Forward Building, Wu’s occupies the site of the old Garden Cafeteria, what used…
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Prairie Sonata: A new novel of Canadian Jewish life
Read this article in Yiddish. Prairie Sonata Sandy Shefrin Rabin FriesenPress, 2020, 288 pp. Yiddish culture always had better luck in Canada than in the United States. Partly this was because Jewish immigrants to Canada were more cohesive and better organized, and Canadian society in general displayed greater respect for cultural diversity. As a result,…
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What We Get Wrong About Karl Marx
While never a believer in Judaism, and at times vicious about the faith, the revolutionary philosopher Karl Marx came from an indisputably Jewish background: Both of his parents’ fathers were rabbis. The fact that he was not, himself, Jewish is the result of a curious historical circumstance. Marx’s father, Heinrich, born Herschel Levi, earned his…
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Michelle Zauner’s new memoir will tell you how grief tastes
If you don’t think great human drama can play out in a supermarket, just read the first pages of Michelle Zauner’s new memoir, “Crying in H Mart.” The largest Asian supermarket chain in the United States, H Mart takes its first initial from the Korean phrase han ah reum, which means “one arm full of…
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Bridge isn’t just for your grandparents anymore
When I think of bridge, I think of my grandmother, who played regularly with her bridge club until she died. I associate the game with a sort of 1950s housewife aesthetic, and the elderly. The whole thing feels quaint. But according to “Dirty Tricks,” a documentary that premiered Thursday at the Hot Docs festival, bridge…
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Why Jeff Goldblum, living meme and baboon whisperer, still matters
They, uh, broke the mold when they made Jeff Goldblum. A delightful eccentric, whose charms lean into singularity, is a kind of cultural anomaly when it comes to lasting power. His iconography — from his “Creation of Adam”-recline in “Jurassic Park,” to a straight-ahead shot of his face from “The Fly” that adorned bathroom stalls…
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Inside the Hidden History of Rosenwald Schools
Julius Rosenwald, the son of Jewish immigrants who fled religious persecution in Germany, turned Sears, Roebuck & Co. into America’s largest retailer. Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery, created the Tuskegee Institute and led the college for more than 30 years. Their groundbreaking partnership in the early decades of the 20th century led…
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