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 To Vote in Other Languages — Including Yiddish
Voting early in Chicago, where the lines were long and snaking around the Edgewater Library stacks, I received a receipt printed in four languages — English, Spanish, Hindi, and Vietnamese. I immediately wondered about languages not listed but certainly heard in this zip code, one of the most diverse in America, and home to refugees…
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Amos Oz, Israel’s Greatest Writer, Delivers Another Masterpiece at Age 77
Judas By Amos Oz, translated by Nicholas de Lange Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $25 Considering how often fellow Israelis have called him a “traitor” (from his early involvement in Peace Now to his recent comparison of violent West Bank settlers to neo-Nazis, which earned him death threats), it should hardly surprise anyone that Amos…
The Latest
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Some of William F. Buckley Jr.’s Best Friends Were Jewish — Really
The degree to which the conservative editor and commentator William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review magazine and TV’s “Firing Line,” was inspired by contacts with Jewish contemporaries may not be fully known to those outside his circle of friends and political foes. Buckley, who died in 2008, is honored with “A Torch Kept…
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How My Hebrew School Teacher Taught Me Who To Vote For on Election Day
My kindergarten teacher at Yeshiva Central Queens was not modern—Mora Ruth had obvious favorites, stared at us while we ate lunch, called us made-up names, and totally let us do gross things like sniff each other’s tushies. I loved her. The only thing I didn’t like about Kindergarten, back in 1969, was that if you…
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Film & TV Revisiting ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ in an Era of Identity Politics
“There’s no way to tear open the secret heart of another human being,” Phillip Green (Gregory Peck) laments in the 1947 movie “Gentleman’s Agreement.” Phil can’t figure out how to do a story on anti-Semitism absent “the drool of statistics and protest.” But he finds a fresh angle on an old issue by living as…
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Well, This Certainly Must Be the Best Backgammon Novel Ever Written
A Gambler’s Anatomy By Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, 304 pages, $27.95 ‘A Gambler’s Anatomy,” Jonathan Lethem’s 10th novel, has a promisingly madcap premise: Alexander Bruno, dashing and suave (“He’d been told he resembled Roger Moore, or the bass player from Duran Duran”), hustles a living as an itinerant backgammon player, relieving overly rich, overly confident “whales”…
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A Trip Back to a New York Where Everyone Was Jewish and Gay
‘Gay Gotham,” the landmark new show at the Museum of the City of New York, doesn’t directly address the Jewish experience. But culture impresario Lincoln Kirstein and maestro Leonard Bernstein, are among the ten figures the exhibit explores. “Through both men, we tell different stories about just how ‘out’ artists could be in that period…
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Why Serial Killers and Jewish Pirates Fascinate Josh Zeman
On November 5, “The Killing Season,” a docu-series about the unsolved case of the Long Island Serial Killer (LISK), premieres on A&E. Documentarian Josh Zeman, born in Seacliff, Long Island, became fascinated with these unsolved killings since the bodies of 10 sex workers were discovered along a desolate highway on Gilgo Beach, LI in 2010…
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A Psychedelic Pippi Longstocking Creates Art So Beautiful It Hurts
Sometimes, going to see an art exhibit can feel like a religious experience; other times, that feeling comes only after you get a chance to leave. This came to mind the other day, after I attended the opening of the Pipilotti Rist retrospective at the New Museum, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. If…
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New Series Forthcoming From Matthew Weiner, Creator of ‘Mad Men’
In yet another win for online entertainment, Matthew Weiner, the Jewish creator of “Mad Men,” has confirmed that he will be creating a new show for Amazon and the Weinstein Company. Since the end of Mad Men’s seven season run (or eight, depending on how you parse it), Weiner has kept busy with a number…
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Books Trump’s Literary Accomplishments, Assessed
Samantha Bee offers up the not-implausible possibility that Donald Trump can’t read. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post has the scoop on a novel Trump had gotten ghostwritten, but that no longer bears his byline. It’s “an incredibly sexist novel,” according to HuffPo’s Todd Van Luling. Were we expecting it to be any other kind? Phoebe Maltz…
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Most Popular
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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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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
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Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish מחשבֿות פֿון אַן אַהיים־געקומענעם (אַ מלחמה־טאָגגבוך)Reflections of a soldier after returning home (a wartime diary)
דער מחבר איז אַ סטודענט אינעם ירושלימער העברעיִשן אוניווערסיטעט, אינעם צווייטן יאָר ייִדיש־לימוד
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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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News At Harvard, reports on antisemitism and anti-Palestinian bias reflect campus conflict over Israel
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Opinion Is JB Pritzker’s very Jewish toughness the key to fighting Trump?
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