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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Why Israel Is Paradise for Birds — and Birdwatchers
(JTA) — Thousands of cranes sit in pairs in a field here, their outlines approaching the horizon. Then, all at once, they take flight, a cloud of black-and-white feathers filling the sky. Shai Agmon isn’t interested in most of these. All he cares about is one pair near the front, slightly shorter than the rest. Most…
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Art Portraying Master Portraitist Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz is perhaps the best-known portrait photographer of our time. Her powerful and iconic images have graced the covers of magazines such as Rolling Stone, Vogue and Vanity Fair for over three decades. Several collections of Leibovitz’s work have been published, and exhibitions of her photographs have appeared in museums and galleries worldwide. A…
The Latest
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Al Jaffee Explains How Mad Magazine Made American Humor Jewish
Editor’s note: Mad magazine will soon be coming off newsstands and will stop publishing new content. DC Entertainment announced Wednesday that starting after issue 10 there will be no new content except for year-end specials. We are republishing this article from 2016 in honor of the magazine’s legacy. On a snowy February afternoon, Al Jaffee,…
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Magical Realism and Sexuality Energize Holocaust Novel
Unspeakable Things By Kathleen Spivack Alfred A. Knopf, 290 pages, $25.95 Severed fingers tapping out a Schubert melody, violated flesh sizzling with sulfurous handprints, ghosts wrapping themselves around the living – these are among the images, unspeakable and clamorous, that populate Kathleen Spivack’s grotesquely poetic debut novel. Audaciously conceived and gorgeously written, “Unspeakable Things” is…
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Film & TV At Berlin Festival, Documentaries Inspire and Infuriate
In nearly a decade of covering Europe’s largest and busiest film fest, one of the aspects I have come to prize most about the Berlinale is the pride of place it bestows to documentaries. Even with this year’s lukewarm line-up, non-fiction films have made the biggest impact, notably the Italian competition entry “Fuocoammare” (“Fire at…
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Malibu Farm Offers a Sustainable Model For Inclusion
For many developmentally disabled children and their parents, the future looks bleak. Getting a job, living a fulfilling life and being independent often seem, at best, like vague ideas on the far side of a wilderness of anxiety and hardship. But for a cohort of 25 “fellows” at a Malibu farm, the reality is now…
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Forward Looking Back
1916 100 Years Ago All the collection activity for Jewish war victims and refugees has brought up the question of just how many Russian Jews there are in America and how rich they are. Are there any Russian Jewish millionaires? If so, how many? It’s an interesting question, because the poor Jews of Manhattan’s Lower…
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When Bernie Sanders Walked Out of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry Reading
When did Allen Ginsberg and Bernie Sanders first meet? What were the circumstances? Even people close to Sanders and Ginsberg do not agree on that history, explored in a recent piece in the Forward. But a photo that surfaced after the story went to press shows the poet, whose outlook reflected socialist ideas and the…
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When Carole King Made the Earth Move
One of the early scenes in “Carole King: Natural Woman,” a new PBS “American Masters” documentary directed by George Scott, features grainy footage from King’s wedding to Gerry Goffin in August 1959. She’s 17 years old, pregnant, adorned in that unmistakable 1950s way, with puffy hair piled high and lipstick as bright as her smile….
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Film & TV LGBT Issues Provide Challenges for Jewish Films
When the Washington Jewish Film Festival opens, on February 24, one of its most interesting offerings will be a series called “Rated LGBTQ.” It’s a curious title, given that movie ratings are used to help delineate which audiences are appropriate for a given film. On the one hand, it’s an invitation: Individuals who identify on…
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Geeking Out on Primo Levi — and Elena Ferrante — With a Master Translator
The great Italian writer Primo Levi is primarily known in this country for memoirs detailing his experiences in Auschwitz, his long journey home after the end of the war and his life as a chemist of Jewish descent in the quiet precincts of Piedmont. These books, published in America as “Survival in Auschwitz,” “The Reawakening”…
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