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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Let’s Get Honest About Gunter Grass
It has already started. In the obituaries for the late German novelist Günter Grass, he has been cast as “the writer who stirred Germany’s conscience,” “the conscience of Germany,” and “the conscience of his generation.” Grass looks set for canonization, but his place in German literary and political history should still be a matter of…
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‘The King’ and Us
“It is a puzzlement,” as Yul Brynner used to crow onstage, how Rodgers and Hammerstein, two American Jewish musical theater titans who promoted ethnic and racial tolerance, created such an insensitive spectacle as 1951’s “The King and I.” Now in its umpteenth Broadway revival, the musical comedy purports to show the historical figure of King…
The Latest
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The Secret Idealism of My Grandma Rose of Texas
Grandma Rose, aka Texas Rose, was mean until the day she died. She was as stingy with love as she was with money, and saved her greatest affection for the San Antonio Spurs, hats with sparkly rhinestones, and anything that could be categorized as a good deal. Even into her 90s, she started each day…
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Let Our Judaica Go!
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what we know and how we know it, or, to put a fancy name to it, the processes by which academic disciplines are constituted and knowledge is organized. The more I mull, the more it seems to me that serendipity, curiosity and passion are key components of that…
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Of Neiman Marcus, Kinky Friedman and 12 Other Things About (Jewish) Texas
1) 158,505 Jews live in Texas. 2) The state’s first Jewish cemetery was established in Galveston in 1852. 3) Texas’s first Jewish congregation, Congregation Beth Israel, was founded in Houston in 1859. 4) Abraham Neiman and Stanley Marcus founded the Neiman Marcus department store in Dallas in 1907. 5) Olga Bernstein Kohlberg opened Texas’s first…
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Was Our Greatest Composer-Critic an Unrepentant Anti-Semite?
Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940-1954 By Virgil Thomson Library of America, 1,200 pages, $45 Kansas City, Missouri-born composer Virgil Thomson is called “America’s greatest composer-critic” in this collection, which addresses the issue of Thomson’s relationship with rival Jewish composers. Brought up in a Southern Baptist family in Missouri, Thomson produced some admirable works such as…
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Where We’re Going This Summer
Oxford, England When my youngest daughter began working on a master’s degree at Oxford University last fall, she became the seventh generation of women in my family to live for an extended period in England. So my husband and I will take a long weekend in June and make a pilgrimage of sorts, back to…
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Naomi Wilzig, Founder of Erotic Art Museum, Dies at 80
Jewish grandmothers don’t usually wear penis necklaces or hang signs announcing “Buying Erotica” while antique shopping. But, Naomi Wilzig, who died in her sleep on Tuesday at 80, was anything but your typical bubbe. Wilzig was the founder of the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, the largest privately-held erotic art collection in…
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Moscow on the Delaware
Sixty-five years ago, my father and I stood hand in hand on the third-floor balcony of our three-level row house in Washington, D.C., watching a large house fire raging somewhere beyond the alley. I was 9 years old, and I still remember how tightly he held my hand and how deeply engrossed he was. He…
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The Life and Death of Jewish Lithuania
● The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police Translated and edited by Samuel Schalkowsky Indiana University Press, 416 pages, $35 When we think of Lithuanian Jewry, we tend to think of Vilnius, “The Yerushalaim of Litte,” for its fame as a Jewish religious and intellectual center, its great scholars, and its contribution to…
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Philip Glass Settles Some Old Scores
Channeling the good Jewish son he never quite was, Philip Glass gives the first line of his new memoir to his mother: “If you go to New York City to study music,” she warns her youngest on the occasion of his graduation from the University of Chicago in 1957, “you’ll end up like your uncle…
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