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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Could Crowdfunding Bring Us More Yiddish and Ladino Literature?
Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have helped filmmakers, bands, visual artists, and regular folks in a jam. Now, the idea of asking friends, family, and the public to kick in dollars to make a project possible is coming to the world of literary translation — as Shortwave, an independent, not-for-profit publisher based in Oxford, turns…
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Why Israel’s Street Lamp Poetry Seems All Too Apt Today
Look up on some of the most famous streets in Jerusalem, and you will see poems or poem-excerpts affixed to streetlamps. I found the one pictured here, on a light-blue banner, high above Emek Refaim Street, which means The Valley of Ghosts Street. The phrase emek refaim appears in the Book of Isaiah (Chapter 17,…
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Did An Israeli Tech Company Accuse Trump Of Plagiarism?
In the (entirely justified) rush to criticize Donald Trump, people are turning towards some outlandish stories in order to sate their (justified) rage. First, there were the crop of false hate crime allegations just post election (we covered one of the false allegations in this article” regarding Trump and Russia. We can also add to…
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EXCLUSIVE: Paul Newman’s Lost Movie Returns — 55 Years Later
Paul Newman’s long-lost film “On The Harmfulness Of Tobacco,” will be shown for the first time in 55 years on February 20. The subject of an extensive and exclusive story in the Forward last November, it will screen at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of its “Newman Directs” program. The Lincoln Center…
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Constitutional Scholar Suing Trump Thinks The Case Could Make History
After Erwin Chemerinsky agreed to an interview with me, I sent a benignly gloating text to a friend who, in high school, had been my teammate in an intensive constitutional law competition. “Are you f****** kidding me right now,” he responded. Chemerinsky is something of an icon in the field of Constitutional law. Now, making…
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Have They Finally Found ‘Bugsy’ Siegel’s Killer?
We all know that famous scene in “The Godfather,” the one where the camera cuts back and forth between Michael Corleone attending a baptism and the slaughter of the Corleone family’s enemies. One of the most iconic shots (no pun intended) during the sequence is the scene in which Moe Greene, the Jewish gangster in…
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Berlinale Premieres Its First Yiddish Film and Revisits an Israeli Classic
A meditative documentary about Samuel Bickels, a polyglot costume drama about Karl Marx and a star-studded André Aciman adaptation are among the films to watch for at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which kicked off on Thursday with the warmly received “Django,” a biopic about the legendary Gypsy Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. When the…
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On Mardi Gras, Are Jews Still Outsiders in New Orleans?
The Rex parade entered the city at the port, the procession stepping from a lavishly decorated boat that drifted down the Mississippi and docked at the foot of Canal Street. It was afternoon on Mardi Gras Day, 1872. Historian Ned Sublette describes the scene in his history of the city, “The Year Before the Flood:…
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Why the Muslim Ban Sent Jewish Writers Flocking to Social Media
On Friday, January 27, one week after he was sworn in as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.” That order — as you’ve now surely heard — did at least two notable things. First, it suspended the “Issuance of Visas and Other…
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How My Illegal Abortion Affirms My Belief in the Right To Choose
I was 18 and in love. The diaphragm a Planned Parenthood clinic had taught me to use had failed. Or I had failed, in my clumsiness, to insert it properly. I was pregnant. I was in California finishing up my degree at UC Berkeley, trying to concentrate on papers and exams, but I also knew…
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The Tragic Story Of Anne Frank’s Brilliant Cousin
Had she known her cousin, Anne Frank might have rephrased a famous statement to read: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really chic at heart.” The French Jewish interior designer Jean-Michel Frank, despite a life of almost unrelieved tragedy — he committed suicide in 1941 at the age of 46 —…
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