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 Virtues Of A Fox Hunt
The Fox Hunt: A Refugee’s Memoir of Coming to America By Mohammed Al Samawi William Morrow, 336pp, $27.99 The story that Mohammed Al Samawi tells in “The Fox Hunt: A Refugee’s Memoir of Coming to America” is one of incredible liberation. First, as a child, from his physical disability into academic excellence, then as an…
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Why Is A Company Run By A Jewish Philanthropist Destroying The Denver Post?
Do you know the story of how Jews came to be known as the People of the Book? After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish people dispersed. Absent the temple that had united them in observance and study, each man was obligated to study Torah for himself. To do this, all men needed…
The Latest
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Why ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Was Really A Jewish Horror Movie
Fifty years ago, In 1968, Roman Polanski’s film “Rosemary’s Baby” was released. It helped to reinvent the modern horror genre. Other than the ethnicity of its director and the fact that it was set in Manhattan, the movie did not seem to be Jewish on the surface. Set in New York City, it tells the…
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Franklin Foer Has Some Scores To Settle With Facebook And Big Data
Franklin Foer’s latest book, “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech,” posits that technology companies’ monopoly on knowledge, as well as our collective attention span, is changing the way we think. In exchange for the efficiency and convenience provided by the “Big 4” firms — Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon — he argues…
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How A Bookstore Owner In Berlin’s Jewish Quarter Invigorated Anti-Nazi Protests
Can bookstores become a powerful force in the fight against neo-Nazis? As far-right parties find success in Germany and across Europe, and xenophobic nationalist groups take to the streets of Berlin, one shop has set the standard as a site of resistance to such movements. According to an April 9 piece in The New York…
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Why Dating In New York Is Just Like Finding A Therapist
I was two hours into a date with a guy who had a cute dog and a desire to explain the novel “Lolita” in graphic detail, and it was time to go. We were in the middle of Madison Park in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, drinking wine out of cans he had brought in a bag….
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Is There Really Such A Thing As Jewish Anxiety?
I am an anxious Jew. By which I mean (a) I am Jewish, and (b) if I had to pick the overarching emotional theme of my life, it would be fear. Or worry. Or panic. One of my first memories is a pediatrician’s visit where I was so scared of an impending vaccination that I…
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Film & TV The IDF Made This Film 18 Years Ago — Why Hasn’t Anyone Seen It?
In 2000, the Israeli Defense Forces produced a major feature film that tackled one of the army’s most taboo subjects, the rising number of soldier suicides. The IDF Army Spokesperson’s Film Unit, headed by Michael Yohay, was given virtually unlimited access to the army’s resource: helicopters, tanks, hundreds of extras and permission to film at…
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What Bette Davis Can Teach Donald Trump About Fake News
You are teaching a class on media literacy. You want your students to think critically about the truth claims of messages. You bring to the classroom Donald Trump and Bette Davis. You display a Trump tweet about our trade deficit with China: “The U.S. is losing $500 Billion a year…. Cannot continue!” You ask your…
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History Of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released in April, 1968, which makes it fifty years old this year. It reinvented the science fiction genre but significantly was underpinned with Jewishness. “2001” was backed by MGM, a studio otherwise known as “Mayer’s Gantze Mishpochah.” It was perceived as a very Jewish firm abroad in…
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‘GI Jews’ Didn’t Just Fight Nazis— They Battled Anti-Semitism In The Ranks Too
(JTA) — “GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II” begins as many Holocaust documentaries do, with a history of the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany mixed with what is now standard archival footage of Brownshirts and Kristallnacht. Throw in interviews with some Jewish celebrities — in this case, Carl Reiner and his friend…
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