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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How Freedom Turned to Propaganda in Soviet Photography
When Alexander Rodchenko took the photograph “Pioneer Playing a Trumpet” in 1930, the Soviet Union had been, albeit briefly, a haven for photographers and filmmakers. The primary reason these art forms flourished there, according to Susan Tumarkin Goodman, co-curator of the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit “The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film,”…
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Books Talking Montreal, Hasids and Bagels With ‘Mystics of Mile End’ Author Sigal Samuel
Sigal Samuel and I grew up in the same city, attended the same college and ended up in the same office. Before that momentous event, our paths had never crossed. (Full disclosure: since then, we have become attached at the hip — or the byline.) I grew up in a secular, if proudly Sephardic, environment….
The Latest
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Art Why Netanyahu Still Doesn’t Take Moshe Safdie’s Calls
Moshe Safdie was sitting in a wood-paneled room in the National Academy of Design’s Beaux-Arts mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, surrounded by his drawings and architectural models. Represented among the works by the septuagenarian architect in the exhibit “Global Citizen: The Art of Moshe Safdie” were materials related to some of his Israeli projects:…
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Resisting the Familiar Narrative of Resistance in France
How could anyone govern a country, Charles de Gaulle once asked, that has 240 different kinds of cheese? Less well known is the question he posed as leader of the Free French during World War II: How can anyone liberate a country that has nearly the same number of resistance movements? Okay, he didn’t really…
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David Gregory Meets His Faith
‘I don’t get this right all the time. Faith is hard. I do still get angry and hurt by it. But I aspire to do better. I’m not going to allow myself to be consumed by disappointment by how I left. This is a rough business.” The speaker is David Gregory, former moderator of “Meet…
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How the All-American Nose Job Got a Makeover
When Jaclyn Trop was thinking of getting a nose job at age 20, she sought counsel from her college professor. Her women’s studies class at Boston University had just finished a unit on cosmetic surgery — the professor had characterized the practice as “symptomatic of internal loathing,” Trop said — and Trop wondered if she…
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Art Gego Draws a Line at the Holocaust
The show currently on display at Dominique Lévy’s gallery on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and devoted to the works of the artist known as Gego, is called “Autobiography of a Line,” after an early art book made by Gego herself. The title suggests something deeply personal, but the show offers something more oblique, more obscurely…
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Our Lives With (and Without) Chantal Akerman
Sometime over last weekend, Chantal Akerman, the Belgian-French-Jewish filmmaker, committed suicide. Her body was found Monday. Her latest film, “No Home Movie,” a verité account of her mother’s decline and death, received its local premiere at the New York Film Festival this week in the immediate aftermath of Chantal’s own death. At the end of…
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Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize Is Tribute to Her Fight Against Anti-Semitic Belarus Tyrant
Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature October 8, is a banned author in her homeland of Belarus, as she explained in a 2013 interview with Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster. Her books are neither published nor discussed in the media there. Due to government persecution, she left Belarus from 2000 to…
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Life in the Nineties
When I was 89 I hid my age. But when I turned 90 it came as such a shock, I had to share my age with everyone. The number is awesome. Now I am 93. There are more than a million people in the world who have reached this age — but none in my…
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Was Henry Kissinger a Misunderstood Idealist?
There have been a lot of words used to describe Henry Kissinger, the first foreign-born secretary of state (Madeleine Albright was the second) whose family fled Nazi persecution for a better life in America. Idealist is hardly one of them for the man revered by some as a master negotiator and brilliant statesman and savaged…
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Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
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Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
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