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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Film & TV Sacha Baron Cohen’s Long Journey From Anatevka to ‘Grimsby’
For the loudest person in the room, Sacha Baron Cohen took a while to find his public voice. Or voices. From the time we met as 16-year-olds, through our college years and while we lived together, Sacha was always the center of attention and always the funniest person around. But people underestimate his commitment to…
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Dr. Strangelove’s Jewish Set Designer Dies at 95
Ken Adam, the German Jewish motion picture production designer who won immortality for conceiving the sets for James Bond films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as well as the Pentagon War Room in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), proved that fantasy can heal historical wounds. Born Klaus Hugo Adam, he died on March 10 at age…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago Boris Thomashefsky is currently playing the role of Piterknap, the poor coalman, in the production of Avraham Shomer’s “Der Griner Milyoner” (“The Immigrant Millionaire”) at the National Theater, in New York City. His character sells coal from a pushcart, is dirt poor, dresses shabbily, scarfs down pickles and tells crude jokes…
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How Golf Became a Tool of Assimilation
I’ve gone to South Florida to give a talk. But first, there’s lunch with the relatives whom I haven’t seen in over a decade. We meet at “the club.” The centerpiece of my cousins’ lives, everything is oriented around it, from their homes to their calendars. We keep the conversation light, and talk of children…
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Music Being BFF’s at the New York Philharmonic
Critics aren’t liable for the headlines the copy desk gives to reviews, so no point chiding The New York Times’s James Oestreich for the burdened praise pinned on a rising Israeli pianist’s recent New York recital: “Inon Barnatan Soldiers Through Hallowed Works.” I winced, because the review itself described a “fascinating and rewarding” evening of…
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Willie Nelson, Itzhak Perlman and the 8 Greatest Gershwin Covers Ever
The Manhattan skyline appears on the cover of the new album, “Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin.” But the sounds come straight from the dry, dusty Southwest. Think slide guitars, harmonicas, and Nelson’s gritty-sweet voice floating like campfire smoke. You never get the sense that the singer is trying too hard as he growls and croons…
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Martin Peretz, Outspoken Ex-New Republic Chief, Angrily Quits YIVO Board
After years of frustration with Jonathan Brent, the CEO and executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Marty Peretz, a board member and the former longtime owner of The New Republic, walked out of YIVO’s budget meeting on Monday March 7 and resigned. “I think Jonathan Brent is … irresponsible, dictatorial,” said Peretz…
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How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel
Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel By Leah Garrett Northwestern University Press, 275 pages, $34.95 Which works of Jewish literature do we remember, and which do we forget? The story we like to tell about American Jewish literature in the mid-20th century is that in the 1950s, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud…
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Film & TV This Must Be the Best Anne Frank Adaptation We’ve Ever Seen
It’s been nearly half a century since George Stevens’s multiple-Oscar-winning 1959 film “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the first and best known of the many film adaptations of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” was released. For many it remains the ultimate cinematic treatment of this classic of Holocaust literature. But that perception might be…
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Books The Making of ‘Falafel Nation’
Yael Raviv (above) is author of “Falafel Nation: Cuisine and the Making of National Identity in Israel (Studies of Jews in Society).” by Yael Raviv, is a work of culinary anthropology that looks at the founding of the state of Israel through the prism of food. The book (University of Nebraska Press) is the outgrowth…
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For Harry Houdini’s Wife, Love Was Not a Magic Trick
Mrs. Houdini By Victoria Kelly Atria Books, 320 pages, $26 The epigraph of this novel, a fictionalized account of the love story between the escape artist Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess, is a quotation from W.B. Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” The Irish…
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