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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How the 87-Year-Old Founder of Jewish Environmentalism Helped Me Grow
Editor’s note: The following article was originally published in 2016 and has been re-published for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Everett Gendler, one of a cohort of rabbis who were active participants in the Civil Rights Movement, was jailed in Georgia alongside King. Read on for more details. I didn’t want to interview Rabbi Everett…
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EXCLUSIVE: Martin Buber Supported MLK In Letter To LBJ
Just before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the National Library of Israel has unveiled a timely letter from its Martin Buber Archive. In 1965 Buber, just before his death, joined a group of Hebrew University professors in writing to President Lyndon B. Johnson to emphasize the importance of the end of King’s brief incarceration following…
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Why ‘Shithole Countries’ Sounds A Bit More Poetic In Hebrew
If you’re wondering what “shithole countries” are in Hebrew, here’s the answer from Israeli newspaper Haaretz: medinot mechurbanot. Countries = medinot. And, well, shitty = mechurban. Of course, churban is “destruction” in Hebrew, as in the destruction of the Temple. Or Temples. For the uninitiated, churban is a college-appropriate word, but mechurban is not. Maybe…
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Dara Horn Asks The Fundamental Questions Of Life — Eternal And Otherwise
ETERNAL LIFE: A NOVEL By Dara Horn W.W. Norton & Company, 256 pages, $25.95 Growing older, we wrestle with the brevity of life, the paucity of our accomplishments, the impossible desire for more time. Beset by nostalgia or regret, we may yearn for the chance to revisit our youth armed with middle-aged wisdom. In her…
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‘The Insult’ Challenges BDS — And It May Just Win An Oscar
Last October, at the Venice Film Festival, Palestinian actor Kamel el Basha won the Best Actor Volpi Cup for his performance in the Ziad Doueiri film “The Insult.” Basha, a respected but low profile theater actor in his first major film role, plays Yasser, a proud Palestinian refugee in Beirut who trades insults with Tony,…
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Remembering Chicago’s Milt Rosenberg — And How He Revived The Art Of Conversation
In recalling Milt Rosenberg, the veteran Chicago radio host who died on January 9 at age 92, the first memory is of a soothing light baritone voice that might have been expected from a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Chicago, where he served as director of the doctoral program in social and…
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How A Master Of Yiddish Cinema Became a Mysterious Roman Prince
By the time of his death in 1965, few would have taken Michal Waszynski for the director of one of the classics of Yiddish cinema. He had been living a surpassingly posh life in Rome, inhabiting a gorgeous urban estate with a social circle that included many of the luminaries of Hollywood and Italian cinema,…
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New York Jewish Film Festival: Five Can’t-Miss Films
Are you a Jewish New Yorker? If so, the likelihood that you will find yourself at the Film Society of Lincoln Center over the next two weeks, as the New York Jewish Film Festival sets in for its annual residency, is fairly high. Given the virtual inevitability of your attendance, what should you see? As…
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National Jewish Book Awards: Golda Meir Biography, David Grossman Win Big
The National Jewish Book Awards have selected Francine Klagsbrun’s “Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel” as the most notable Jewish book of 2017. Other big winners included Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of The Jewish Week of New York, who won the first-ever Carolyn Starman Hessel Mentorship Award — a press release which…
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Q&A: Remembering The Writers Who Defied The Nazis To Save Jewish Texts
Under the Nazi occupation of Poland, if a Jew in Vilna was caught bringing outside goods into the city’s ghetto, they risked paying with their life. Yet a group of Jewish writers and thinkers, a portion of those compelled by the Nazis to aid in the looting of Vilna’s storied institutions of Jewish culture, smuggled…
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Will Oprah Winfrey Be Our First Jewish President?
Now that Oprah Winfrey has all but been inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States – thereby becoming the first woman to hold the office (and only the second African-American) – the question on everyone’s mind is: will Oprah also count as the first Jewish president? Well, let’s see. It’s not true that…
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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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News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
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Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward Halal restaurant opening in Congress is like ‘Muslim conquest of Jerusalem,’ says GOP congressman
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Fast Forward Germany formally classifies far-right AfD party as extremist, in blow to Nazi-linked populist movement
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Fast Forward Trump taps shock jock Sid Rosenberg and a Haredi newspaper publisher for Holocaust Memorial Council
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Music Jill Sobule was as much a Jewish icon as a queer one
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