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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‘Some Like It Hot’ Adaptation Will Hit Broadway — But Can Anything Top The Movie?
60 years after the original film’s premiere, “Some Like it Hot” — the legendary Billy Wilder-directed comedy about two musicians who dress in drag and join an all-female band led by Marilyn Monroe to escape the mob — will come to Broadway. According to The New York Times’s Michael Paulson, producers Craig Nadan and Neil…
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That Time Tom Wolfe Lampooned Leonard Bernstein And ‘Radical Chic’
The satiric novelist and essayist Tom Wolfe died on May 14 at age 88 in the midst of world-wide celebrations for the centenary of Leonard Bernstein. This timing might have appealed to Wolfe’s well-developed sense of irony, since he authored “Radical Chic,” a savage takedown of Bernstein first published in June 1970 by New York…
The Latest
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From That White Suit To That Feud With Chomsky: Reflections On Tom Wolfe
The writer Tom Wolfe, one of the pioneers of the literary movement known as the New Journalism — alongside the likes of Joan Didion, Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin — passed away on Monday at age 88. Wolfe, who was notably verbose and only slightly less notably eager to get into scraps with his peers,…
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Q & A: Joel Meyerowitz On Being The First Person To Photograph Ground Zero
Joel Meyerowitz grew up in the East Bronx, and rose to prominence as a New York street photographer. Now, he lives in Tuscany, foraging flea markets for odd objects and arranging them in striking ways to create evocative still life photographs. In a new retrospective book on his work, “Where I Find Myself” — which is…
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Is Michael Chabon’s New Book Really A Book?
Pops: Fatherhood In Pieces By Michael Chabon HarperCollins, 144 pages, $19.99 “You can write great books,” a writer, a “great man,” once told Michael Chabon at a party on the Truckee River, “or you can have kids. It’s up to you.” That’s an interesting sentiment, though I found myself wondering who this “great man” was….
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The Secret Jewish History Of Sports Gambling
The Supreme Court has overturned a federal ban on state-authorized gambling on sporting events, thus reopening the door to a profession that has long boasted its fair share of Jewish participants, some legendary in the field. The likes of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, of course, were instrumental in organizing gambling on a host of…
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Why Do We Keep Honoring This Unrepentant Anti-Semite?
A new book from St. Martin’s Press by Susan Ronald, biographer of Adolf Hitler’s art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, details how Florence Gould (1895-1983 a society hostess born in America of French parents, was an egregious collaborator during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. Yet today, New Yorkers flock to the Florence Gould Hall at the French…
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Ruchie Freier: Hasidic Judge, American Trailblazer
Judge Rachel (“Ruchie”) Freier, 52, is the only Hasidic woman judge in the world. She knows she’s an anomaly, and yet she sees nothing contradictory between her deeply held religious beliefs and her high-powered, secular career. “People always make a big deal that I’m the first Hasidic woman judge, but my husband [mortgage broker David…
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Q & A: How The Kishinev Pogrom Shaped History, From The Bolsheviks To The NAACP
Close to noon on April 6, 1903 — Easter Sunday — as families took in the newly pleasant weather in Kishinev, then part of Russia, a group of young boys started to hassle some of the Jews who had joined the Christian families in Chuflinskii Square. It happened every year. The period around Easter always…
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Art In 1930s German And Austrian Art, Portents Of A Dark Future
Currently at the Neue Galerie, the exhibition “Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of 1930s,” is as fateful as its title suggests — devoted to paintings, photographs, prints and drawings made under the lengthening shadow of Nazi terror. It’s a show suffused with anxiety and denial. Many of the artists were representatives of the…
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Theater Why We Need Hanoch Levin Now, And Maybe In Yiddish
Going to see an intense, absurdist Hebrew play performed in Yiddish for 20 people in Manhattan’s West Village may not be the most esoteric entertainment I’ve enjoyed in my decade at the Forward (though it surely comes close), but explaining its significance presents a challenge. And yet, just like Hanoch Levin’s “The Labor of Life”…
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