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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Books How Do You Solve a Problem Like Chani Kaufmann?
Chani and Baruch are about to get married. In her heavy, layered dress, the sweat drips down the hollow of her back and collects in pools under her arms. She has never been kissed, never held a boy’s hand. As for Baruch, such is his panic that he cannot even remember Chani’s face, though they…
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Britannia Rules the Words No More in Israel
While waiting for a train in an Israeli station the other day, I was bemused to hear an announcement in English, following a similar one in Hebrew, that said, “Smokers are requested to smoke only in the dedicated area.” I suppose someone meant “designated,” unless the announcement concerned dedicated smokers. This kind of thing isn’t…
The Latest
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Film & TV Filmmaker Jessie Kahnweiler Sees Satire in Rape
Filmmaker Jessie Kahnweiler, known for her comic spiritual YouTube adventure “Dude, Where’s My Chutzpah?” has a new video out, and viewers don’t know quite what to make of it. It’s called “Meet My Rapist.” The short satirical film is a response to Kahnweiler’s own rape, which occurred almost eight years ago, when she was 20…
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Remembering Composer Vivian Fine on Her Centenary
September 28 marks the centenary of Vivian Fine (1913-2000) a Chicago-born composer who was profoundly influenced by Yiddishkeit. As Fine, who died in 2000 at the age of 87, told the composer Elizabeth Vercoe in a 1992 interview, her mother came from a “Russian Jewish family and started to work herself when she was 14….
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Gary Graffman’s Journey From Jewish Piano Virtuoso to Civil Rights Pioneer
Recent commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement’s landmark March on Washington might not appear to have much in common with the legacy of American Jewish pianist Gary Graffman, who celebrates his 85th birthday on October 14. But history entwined the two in 1964, when one of this country’s most revered musicians…
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Journeying Back to the Land of Amos Oz
Between Friends By Amos Oz Translator Sondra Silverston Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 192 pages, $24 As historian Derek Penslar has remarked, the kibbutz is “one of the hallmarks of the Zionist project, and although it appears to have reached its end as a generative and innovative force within Israeli society, the kibbutz’s historical grandeur and significance…
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The Exile and Resurrection of Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall. The name alone conjures a world — a simple, superstitious village, smelling strongly of hay and manure. The single story houses all have thatched roofs. The people are poor, uneducated, but their lives are filled with magic. Angels and ghosts wander among them. Sometimes devils, too. And that fiddler you hear on the…
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Books Ryan Braun Yanked from ‘Jewish Sports Stars’ Cover
If you’re Jewish, and a sports star, you probably have an assured spot in David J. Goldman’s “Jewish Sports Stars: Past and Present.” But if you’re found to be violating Major League Baseball’s enhancing drug policy, you might not make the cover. So it goes for Ryan Braun, the disgraced slugger who was suspended for…
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Navigating Battlefield of Orthodox Marriage and Divorce
Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State: Israel’s Civil War By Susan M. Weiss and Netty C. Gross-Horowitz Brandeis University Press, 240 pages, $40 Until modern times, an agunah, a “chained” or “anchored” woman, was usually a wife whose husband had been lost at sea or killed on the battlefield; rabbis wrote circles around the…
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The Not-So-Dirty ‘Dirty Dancing’ Story
In the mid-1980s, Eleanor Bergstein returned to Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills, where she had vacationed as a child during its heyday, to research her screenplay for “Dirty Dancing.” One night, she got a call from Hollywood. “While I was on the phone,” she told the Forward, “the operator broke in and said: ‘You better…
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Rediscovering Beauty Amid Ruins of Once-Glorious Catskills
Photographer Marisa Scheinfeld pointed to a pile of rubble at what’s left of the famous Catskills resort hotel the Concord — once a glamorous beast of luxury with 1,200 rooms, three golf courses and a 3,000-seat dining room. “Over here was the outdoor pool, which was a tremendous, Olympic-sized swimming pool that I worked at…
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