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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Why Chernobyl’s Jewish History Still Matters — 31 Years After The Accident
My aunt recently reminded me that everything changed on April 26, 1986. I knew this, of course, but it wasn’t often that my family talked about the accident or the evacuation. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my grandfather Mikhail spoke proudly of his work at a nuclear power plant, as well as of…
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Remembering The Man Who Fixed The Legendary ‘Quiz Show’ Of 1956
Albert Freedman, the game show producer featured in “Quiz Show” (1994), the Oscar-winning film by Robert Redford, died on April 11 at age 95. Although he was a secondary character in Redford’s film, played by Hank Azaria, in real life he was at the heart of a maelstrom of TV scandals during the Eisenhower era…
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Adam Greenberg Wants To Be Remembered For More Than Just One Fateful Pitch
Adam Greenberg always viewed being Jewish as a central part of his story. He had even more reason to emphasize that point during a recent appearance at a Jewish United Fund event in suburban Chicago. Addressing a group of parents with their school-age children, Greenberg told them, “You know when people say life throws you…
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The Secret Jewish History Of Neil Gaiman And ‘American Gods’
According to Neil Gaiman, advance reviews for ‘American Gods,” mini-series based on his novel, are “kind of astonishing.” The central premise of “American Gods” (which debuts on Starz April 30) is that immigrants coming to America brought their mythology and gods with them. But over generations, the newcomers succumbed to different deities, technology, money, celebrity…
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A Personal History Of Holocaust Remembrance
At this time of year, public memory in Israel is most intense. Things come to a head in the course of a single week, from the morning of Yom HaShoah until the end of Yom HaZikaron. I call this period Bein Hatzefirot, “Between The Sirens,” because it begins with a minute-long siren the morning of…
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Will Radiohead Resist The Call To Boycott Israel?
Radiohead is scheduled to play a gig in Tel Aviv July 19, as the Forward reported in February. Several of Radiohead’s contemporaries have asked the band “to think again” about playing the gig, writing an open letter on the website Artists For Palestine-UK. The letter includes the likes of Roger Waters, Thurston Moore, TV on…
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Trump’s Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day Statement Continues Tradition Of Denial
Today is not only Yom HaShoah, but also Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. As I have previously discussed, the Armenian Genocide, a crime for which the term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, has gone unacknowledged by Turkey, which perpetrated the genocide, and also by countries such as Israel, the U.K., and the United States. In…
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Dmitry Kuzmin: The Russian Poet You Need To Read Right Now
At the end of one of Dmitry Kuzmin’s poems, there is a curious stanza, which, to an American reader comes across as an odd bit of legalese. But to a Russian like Kuzmin, the stanza is both a social critique and a method of self preservation (we will return to the rest of the poem…
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Meet New Zealand’s Only Jewish Comic (Named Debbie)
Debbie Filler wanted to call her one-woman show “All My Lennys” — both Leonard Cohen and Leonard Bernstein loom large in the piece and in her life. But she settled on “I Did It My Way in Yiddish (In English),” a sly reference to her late father’s belief that Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, and “everybody…
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How The Jews Beat Tay Sachs
Not long ago, having a baby was a fairly straightforward venture. When a couple decided to have a child, they’d ditch the birth control pills and dim the lights. But with no plastic wand with twin purple lines to offer instant at-home confirmation, there was no easy way to gauge success. The first home pregnancy…
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The Genetic Mutation That Threatens A Family
When Joselin Linder’s father William died of a sudden and debilitating mystery disease in his late 40s, she didn’t realize that it was the marker of a deadly gene that was stalking her family. Twenty years on, she, her sister and her cousins live under the shadow of a gene variant that seems to have…
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