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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Is This Sugarcane Plantation ‘America’s Auschwitz’?
The April issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a piece entitled “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” on the Whitney Plantation as “a rebuke – and an antidote to our sanitized history of slavery.” I came across this piece online, and I was drawn to the provocative headline as well as the setting, a town less than an hour…
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Trump’s Holocaust Remembrance Day Statement Is A Threefold Disgrace
January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. But “Holocaust Remembrance” is not as clear cut a phrase as it might seem. In Poland, the government is suing Holocaust scholar Jan Gross over his work on the country’s role in the genocide. In Lithuania, another blood-soaked nation that refuses to reckon with its past, we see…
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David Ben-Gurion Makes An Argument For Israel, And More of The Forward Looking Back
100 Years Ago The Brownsville section of Brooklyn is so Jewish that in the local courthouse you’ll find a clerk who speaks a beautiful Yiddish. In the police station there’s a Jewish captain who also speaks good Yiddish. And what neighborhood sends a socialist assemblyman to Albany? Brownsville. There’s even a Hasidic rebbe, over whose…
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Is Trump Attacking CNN Because of Grudge Against Jewish CEO?
Jeff Zucker, President of CNN, just can’t catch a break. (Not that he necessarily deserves one, given CNN’s long history of blunders, from mistaking a dildo covered flag for an ISIS flag, to falsely reporting the arrest of the Boston bombers, to Don Lemon suggesting the missing Malaysia Air flight MH370 may have been swallowed into…
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Finding a Jewish Homeland — Just Northwest of Buffalo
Isra Isle By Nava Semel, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen Mandel Vilar Press, 240 pages, $16.95 The boom in Jewish alternate history continues. Following on the heels of Lavie Tidhar’s novel, “A Man Lies Dreaming” (about Adolf Hitler failing to become the Führer of Nazi Germany), Emily Barton’s “The Book of Esther” (about…
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The Secret Jewish History of the Doomsday Clock
In 2017, contention for the title of the day’s worst piece of news is tight. Is it the portent of a coming crackdown on voting rights? The felony charges for 6 reporters covering protests of President Donald Trump’s inauguration? (Ok, that was earlier this week, but still.) The doubling of membership fees at exclusive clubs…
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How Mary Tyler Moore Brought Real Jewish Characters to the World
(JTA) — There are plenty of paradigms in the history of humor for how Jews and non-Jews get along, or don’t: as persecutors and victims, as saviors and saved, as allies against a common oppressor. All these are fraught with the tensions between the powerful and the disempowered, which makes sense: Fear drives humor. But…
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Worried About Dystopia? ‘1984’ Isn’t The Only Novel You Should Read
On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Donald Trump, suggested that when Press Secretary Sean Spicer spouted falsehoods about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration during a Saturday press conference, he was not lying, but simply relying on “alternative facts.” If a portent of doom can have unintended positive consequences, that phrase…
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The History Behind Sean Spicer’s Favorite Breakfast Food – Orbit Gum
Sean Spicer, the new White House Press Secretary, is, well, a very weird guy. Leaving aside his unfashionable, dogmatic loyalism and his , we still have his tweets. His glorious glorious tweets. The long standing Dippin’ Dots feud (“Dippin dots is NOT the ice cream of the future,” Spicer declared in 2010. “I think I…
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How 1986 Meetings I Set Up Between Top Israelis and Palestinians Still Offer Hope
Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years, Stephen P. Cohen served as a confidential intermediary between Israeli and Arab leaders including Shimon Peres, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Hafez al-Assad. Over the course of a career that took him to all corners of the Middle East, Cohen arranged and participated in historic breakthroughs…
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Vintage Slapstick Movies Show Just How Much, And How Little, Racism Has Changed
Watching a comedy from the silent film era is, as the Museum of Modern Art’s website suggests, to stare directly into the “vast subconscious that is American slapstick.” And, based on the title that the museum has chosen for its series of silent film screenings, “Cruel and Unusual Comedy: Astonishing Shorts from the Slapstick Era,”…
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