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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Books Ferrante and the Freedom of the Jewish Woman Author
It’s neat, in a way, that Elena Ferrante’s Jewish. Well, not Ferrante—the author behind the pseudonym. Anita Raja, the Italian translator whom Claudio Gatti has convincingly argued is Elena Ferrante, is, as Gatti recently explained in detail in the New York Review of Books, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Whether we think it’s terrible…
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Was This Hippie Yenta the Zelig of Rock ‘n’ Roll?
Reading between the lines of the new documentary “Danny Says,” about music industry insider Danny Fields, it’s not quite clear if Fields was simply a Zelig of rock ‘n’ roll — linked in one way or another to the Beatles, the Doors, Cream, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, MC5, and the Ramones — or a phenomenal…
The Latest
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How To Kill a Butterfly Like Elena Ferrante — or JT Leroy
What shocks me is not that someone was able to rip away the veil of privacy from the Italian writer known to the world as Elena Ferrante; nor am I surprised that she was able to maintain that anonymity for as long as she did. What startles me is the spectacle of people reporting this…
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JSwipe Right: Fall in Love With the Revolutionary Founder David Yarus
While the founder of JSwipe (which is often dubbed the Jewish Tinder) describes himself as a “post-affiliation” Jew, he’s accomplished what scores of religious rabbis and traditional grandparents could only dream of doing: He’s matchmade hundreds of Jewish marriages and thousands of Jewish relationships. David Yarus, 30, and his three co-founders, working night and day…
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Is The Truth About Elena Ferrante In Her Name — Or Her Books?
This past Sunday, the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti published an investigation into the “true identity” of novelist Elena Ferrante in the New York Review of Books, as well as outlets in France, Italy, and Germany. Based on financial and real estate records, he concluded that Ferrante was actually a Rome-based translator whose Jewish mother survived…
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3 Threats to a Healthy Climate of Criticism
The release of the first new Jonathan Safran Foer novel for over a decade highlights how book reviewing has changed since “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” appeared in 2005. In those days Facebook had barely launched, Google still did no evil and Apple wasn’t avoiding taxes on iPhones — since that device was yet to…
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9 Surprising Jewish Things About Jesse Jackson For His 75th Birthday
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, two-time presidential candidate, peace negotiator and founder of the Rainbow Coalition and Operation PUSH, has had a long, complicated history with the Jewish community. On the occasion of his 75th birthday, we look back at some of the highlights and the lowlights of that relationship. 1) In 1974, Jackson appeared as…
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How Bono Is Using the Words of a Jewish Poet To Denounce Donald Trump
The latest big name artist who’s taking issue with the candidacy of Donald Trump is Bono, leader of U2. The band has released “Liberty,” a video of a live performance that uses the song “Bullet the Blue Sky” to underscore a back-and-forth between Bono and a video of Trump proposing the erection of a wall…
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4 Jewish Poets For #NationalPoetryDay
If you asked why National Poetry Day was important, the great Jewish American poet Howard Nemerov would refer you – perhaps politely, perhaps not – to the world outside. In the brief poem “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry,” he positions his readers in a scene in which rain turns to…
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When Fox News Went From Chinatown to Boro Park in Search of More Stereotypes
After Jesse Watters’s triumphant trip to New York’s Chinatown, he headed south to Boro Park. Having spent time with people vaguely represented in the foreign policy discussion of the Vice Presidential candidates, he wanted to meet the Jews who have been the subjects of so many tweets by Donald Trump’s supporters. The segment hasn’t yet…
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Why Do So Many South American Jews Write About Oppression?
The Chilean-born Jewish poet Marjorie Agosín has written “Always From Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean Jewish Father”; “Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America”; and “Taking Root: Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America,” among other books. After fleeing the dictatorship of President Augusto Pinochet in Chile with her parents in the…
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