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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Phil Chess, the Jewish Hitmaker Who Helped Create Rock ‘n’ Roll, Dies at 95
One day after his greatest discovery, Chuck Berry, turned 90, the legendary hit man Phil Chess passed away at the age of 95 (on October 19). Chess and his brother, Leonard Chess, cofounded their record label in Chicago in the late 1940s, through which they played a huge role in shepherding the careers of blues…
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How Jewish Comic Book Heroes Inspired Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art
Though he was the grandson of German-Jewish immigrants. Roy Lichtenstein played down his roots. But as a new exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles suggests, Lichtenstein’s Jewishness shaped the pop art pioneer’s career from his first experiments until the end of his life in 1997. “Lichtenstein’s story, in many ways, is an…
The Latest
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Music How Jewish Record Men Helped Chuck Berry Invent Rock ‘n’ Roll
More than any other singular individual – including Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis – it was Chuck Berry, who turns 90 years old today, who put together the disparate musical elements, the teen-focused lyrics, and the showman’s persona that created the template for all rock ‘n’ roll music that followed. The Beatles,…
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That Time My Father Met Albert Einstein
Around the end of the 1940s, Albert Einstein needed surgery and decided to have it done at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. My family used Brooklyn Jewish because my father’s older brother Will was attending physician in Ob/Gyn there. He delivered me and my sister there. My father was there for a hemorrhoidectomy. In those days, hospitals…
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Chicago Mercantile Exchange Chair Leo Melamed Stars in His Son’s Movie
CHICAGO — For many years, the name Leo Melamed has been virtually synonymous with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Melamed first ventured onto the trading floor in the 1950s as a law student working as a runner. The CME, when Melamed joined it, operated under the open outcry system of traders and brokers communicating through shouts…
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In Berlin, A Remembrance of Synagogues Past
How do you take a walk down memory lane if you don’t have any memories of your own? That’s what I was asking myself on September 11 of this year, when the United States was commemorating the 15th anniversary of a great domestic tragedy and I was in Berlin, participating in yet another attempt to…
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Why Sukkot Is the Most Magical Holiday of All
‘I can’t wait for Sukkot.” An expression of anticipatory excitement coming from a fellow member of my temple? Our rabbi? My Orthodox cousins? It was the 13-year-old son of our non-Jewish neighbors. And another piece of evidence of a remarkable phenomenon our family has discovered about the holiday: That it is magic. No, it’s not…
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The Secret Jewish History of the NBC Peacock
“Why would anybody be interested in my mishegas?” Larry Pomerance is 82 and still smokes. He sits on a windy terrace eating a bialy. I’ve known Larry for eight years and I can say without qualification that what he terms “mishegas” is funny and worth sharing. Not that I didn’t have to practically pull teeth…
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WATCH: Steven Sondheim Revisits One of His Most Brilliant Failures
One of the highlights of the recent New York Film Festival was the premiere of Lonny Price’s documentary “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened,” which goes behind the scenes of one of Broadway’s most legendary failures, “Merrily We Roll Along,” directed by Harold Prince with a score by Steven Sondheim. Though Sondheim’s score…
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Why the Tallit Is Making a Comeback
Funny how it takes a kerfuffle to get people thinking about what they wear, especially within the precincts of the sanctuary. In the wake of Donald Trump’s donning a prayer shawl, or tallit, while visiting an African-American church in September, I, like many of you, took to the Internet to learn more. Was the wearing…
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Did Radical Politics Undercut the Work of This Brilliant Photographer?
Louis Stettner, the American Jewish photographer who died on October 13 at age 93, produced images governed by Socialist ideals to the point where a full understanding of his creative personality requires looking at his works in other media. After early inspiration to take up photography by encounters with such talents as Alfred Steiglitz and…
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