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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They Were the Good Kids on the Lower East Side
The three alter kockers looked much younger than their years when they greeted each other at the Seward Park Library on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Mentally sharp, with considerable color in their skin and dyed hair, they seemed giddy that they’d been chosen to be the first formal interview subjects for The New York Public…
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Books Protecting Anne Frank’s Voice — Even 7 Decades Later
When Anne Frank wrote in her diary to pass the time, she probably never even thought about copyright law or the sticky question of who would come to own her words. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 15, but her father Otto survived and eventually was persuaded to…
The Latest
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The 8 Best Jewish Graphic Novels of 2015, From Ayn Rand to Orthodox Babysitters
It’s never too late to jump on the comic books wagon, or as some call them: graphic novels. We definitely know they’re not just for kids anymore, after Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer and all that. Reading comics makes you look cooler, smarter and younger: it’s a fact (ok, it’s not, but don’t blame me…
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Israel Bans Novel About Mixed Romance From Classrooms
Israel’s Education Ministry has ruled against the inclusion of a novel about a romance between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man in the Hebrew high school curriculum because it feared it could raise tensions among pupils, an official said on Thursday. Israeli media said some teachers requested Dorit Rabinyan’s novel, “Borderlife,” be included in…
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New French History Offers a Ray of Hope for Jewish-Muslim Relations
The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims From North Africa to France By Ethan B. Katz Harvard University Press 480 pages, $35 In August 1961, two Algerian Jews, Simon Zouaghi and Martin Benisti, disembarked in Marseilles. The two men — one a butcher, the other a cook — had uprooted themselves and their loved ones…
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He Dreamed a Dream in Yiddish
Over the weekend, two events encapsulated Yiddish New York, the week-long festival of Yiddish arts, music and culture that served to replace a gaping hole in the calendar left by the demise of KlezKamp, which ended its 30-year run last year at this time. On Saturday night at the Museum of Jewish Heritage at Battery…
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PHOTOS: The Last Jews of ‘The Fiddler’s’ Shtetl
With Fiddler on the Roof opening on Broadway to rave reviews, we republish an article Edward Serotta wrote for the German newspaper Die Zeit on January 8, 1998, after he stumbled upon the former shtetl where Sholem Aleichem first started writing. None of those mentioned in this article are still living, or remain in Bogoslav…
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Film & TV How Haskell Wexler Became the Epitome of Cool
Haskell Wexler had a deep knack for the cool — how else to achieve fame as a cinematographer? Name another — go on, I dare you. In a town that worships “the talent” over actual technical talent, Wexler’s work behind the camera stood out in Hollywood. And, even rarer, the man stood for something; he…
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How Debbie Reynolds Became the Perfect Jewish Mother
The witty, multitalented performer Debbie Reynolds, who died on December 28 at age 84, surprisingly found herself associated with Judaism both on- and off-screen. From celebrity notoriety as the decidedly non-Jewish spouse of Jewish singer Eddie Fisher, Reynolds survived her marriage’s breakup and went on be cast onscreen as Jewish or crypto-Jewish mothers in later…
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Why 2015 Was the Most Yiddish Year of All
For a supposedly dead or dying language, Yiddish is not going down without a fight. In fact, we’re in the midst of a rich and creative revival such that the language and its culture hasn’t seen in decades. Yiddish Studies programs are cropping up at the unlikeliest of colleges and universities across the United States….
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5 Great Moments From Haskell Wexler’s Career
Haskell Wexler, one of the film world’s most gifted cinematographers, has died at the age of 93. A two-time Academy Award winner and three-time nominee for movies such as “Bound for Glory,” “Blaze” and “Matewan,” Wexler was born in 1922 to a Jewish family in Chicago where he befriended future influential publisher Barney Rosset and…
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