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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A Good Man Is Hard To Find (At A Jewish Youth Convention)
When I worked at a Jewish summer camp, I developed a philosophy of dating that I based on a Jewish sports game called gaga. Gaga is a primitive ball-based game that takes place in a pit and involves maneuvering a rubber ball to hit other players in the shins or feet (they’ve never, ever let…
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How The Vilna Troupe Took Yiddish Theater Global
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The world-famous Yiddish theater that eventually became known as the Vilna Troupe had its beginnings under remarkable and completely unexpected circumstances. Before World War I, Vilna had a high-quality Russian theater that attracted a mostly Jewish audience, in part due to the Polish intellectuals’s boycott of Russian…
The Latest
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‘Mean Girls,’ ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ‘Angels In America’ Lead Tony Nominations
After a particularly boring season on Broadway, there are few surprises among this season’s nominees for the Tony Awards. “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Mean Girls” predictably mopped up nominations, scoring 12 apiece in a season in which new musicals were scarce. Equally predictably, “Escape to Margaritaville,” the Jimmy Buffet musical, won no Tony love; somewhat more…
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Israel’s Security At 70 — Laura E. Adkins In Conversation With Danny Yatom
Laura E. Adkins, deputy opinion editor of the Forward will be appearing in conversation with Major General (ret.) Danny Yatom, the eighth director of the Mossad (1996-98). The event will take place at Bnai Jeshurun on Wednesday May 2. Yatom served as deputy commander of the IDF’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit, military secretary under Defense…
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Theater Is Israel’s Most Famous Playwright Too Political For His Own Country?
In 1985, “Palestinian Girl,” a drama by Joshua Sobol, Israel’s most famous and prolific living playwright, premiered in the Haifa Theater. A story about a love affair between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman whose relationship is being destroyed by right-wing thugs, the play was controversial, but a huge success. This was a few…
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How This Bible Got To Jerusalem — And Other Secrets Of Gershom Scholem’s Library
If you have ever wanted to visit the private library of a major intellectual, the place to be is Jerusalem, where Gershom Scholem’s personal library — along with the desk he wrote on — lives inside a room at the National Library of Israel. The space is homey, and feels a bit like a private…
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The Strange-But-True Story Of A Mossad-Run ‘Dive Resort’ In Muslim Sudan
It was one of the Mossad’s most daring, complex and longest-running operations. But only now, 37 years on, is the story of a Red Sea diving resort run by the agency getting its moment in the sun. “Operation Brothers,” which ran for over three years in the early 1980s, was a breathtaking mission. At its…
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Books Sami Rohr Prize Finalists Include Ilana Kurshan, Yair Mintzker
The finalists for the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, announced today, are Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink,” Sara Yael Hirschhorn’s “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement,” Shari Rabin’s “Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yair Mintzker’s “The Many Deaths of Jew…
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Music John Zorn’s Done With His Masada Project. So, What’s Next?
In 1993, John Zorn began composing music based on Jewish themes for a new group, Masada Quartet. Now, 25 years and 613 tunes later, Zorn is closing the book — literally and figuratively — on what evolved into a sprawling, genre-defying series of hundreds of compositions written for dozens of different ensembles, all united by…
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The Art Of Losing Isn’t Hard To Master
The following essay is excerpted from Alberto Manguel’s “Packing My Library,” reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. Maybe loss is an inherited trait. My maternal grandmother had a gift for losing things. She had emigrated as a teenager from the outskirts of Ekaterinburg to one of Baron Hirsch’s colonies in the Argentinean Mesopotamia, and…
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On Joshua Harmon’s ‘Admission’ To An Argument
During the summer of 1973, the renowned civil rights attorney Joseph Rauh, Jr. delivered the featured speech at the annual fund-raising dinner of the Milwaukee Jewish Council. The audience, Rauh noted, surely expected him to address the burgeoning Watergate scandal, the attempt by Republican operatives tied to President Richard Nixon to break into Democratic National…
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