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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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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Film & TV Why Billy Wilder Called Jerry Lewis a Shmuck And Other Showbiz Tales
“How are you, Marty?” Jerry Lewis asked, sizing up his former director Martin Scorsese. “You’re not as tall as I thought you were.” His last words were clipped by a roomful of laughter, and the 89-year-old comedian, on hand for the Museum of the Moving Image and Comedy Hall of Fame discussion series “Iconic Characters…
The Latest
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Film & TV How I Stole Chantal Akerman’s Ideas For the Obama White House
When I met Chantal Akerman, the famed film director whose alleged suicide was reported on October 6, I told her I was going to steal her shit. I didn’t blurt it out exactly like that, but having just seen her film “D’est” projected on a big beautiful screen at Cornell Cinema in 1995, I was…
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Frank Sinatra’s Love Affair With the Jewish People
“Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World,” by the American Jewish poet and anthologist David Lehman, will appear in time for the centenary of Ol’ Blue Eyes, on December 12. The icon who belted out “Come Fly With Me,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Kind of Town,” and “New York,…
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Film & TV Chantal Akerman, Pioneering Feminist Filmmaker, Dies at 65
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, a daughter of Holocaust survivors known for her experimental films that closely examined women’s lives, has died in Paris. She was 65. French media reported that Akerman committed suicide. The date and cause are not yet known, according to the New York Times. Her parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, and her…
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Film & TV Jeffrey Tambor Talks ‘Transparent’ and the Kosher Chicken Dance at New Yorker Festival
Jeffrey Tambor used to be that actor you saw everywhere but couldn’t place. No longer. In January, he won a Golden Globe in the Best Actor in a TV Series category, for his performance as Maura Pfefferman, a Jewish father of three who comes out as transgender, in Amazon’s “Transparent.” In September he took home…
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Books Why Secular-to-Orthodox Memoirs Matter
“Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.” This quote from Ann Patchett sums up my feelings about writing — and it’s also how I feel about my chosen religious lifestyle. I grew up in a secular Jewish home and, as a young adult, was drawn…
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A Tale of David Simon and Two Jewish Lawyers
When I was in high school in Baltimore County, Maryland, there was a lame joke that was equally popular with white and black students. I attended Pikesville High School, a public school so Jewish, a popular rumor claimed that rival schools had thrown bagels on the field at sporting events. The school sits on the…
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Books ‘The Mystics of Mile End’ Takes You Inside Hasidic Montreal
The Mystics of Mile End, Forward editor Sigal Samuel’s debut novel about a dysfunctional Jewish family, will be published by HarperCollins on October 13. Told from multiple perspectives, the story takes place in an iconic Montreal neighborhood that is home to hipsters and Hasidic Jews. In this excerpt, we see the family and their neighbors…
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Art A Wandering Sukkah Draws Curious Onlookers
There is a 1960s style sukkah bolted atop a black 2003 Chevrolet pickup with Connecticut plates driving through all five boroughs this week that looks unlike any wooden hut I made in Hebrew School during the holiday of Sukkot. It actually brought to mind the pattern of a vintage faux Pucci turtleneck I own and…
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Art Ben Shahn Was a Propagandist and Proud of It
Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene By Diana L. Linden Wayne State University Press, 184 pages, $44.99 Albert Einstein disembarking in America alongside anonymous impoverished refugees. Prescient views in 1939 of concentration camp prisoners in Nazi Germany. These are just two of the indelible images created on a monumental scale…
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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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Culture Cardinals are Catholic, not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?
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Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
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