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 Not All Autobiographical Elements Are Equal
Ilan Mochari’s novel, “Zinsky the Obscure” (Fomite Press), is now available. He is Chief Writer for The Build Network and a contributor to Cognoscenti, the online magazine for Boston’s NPR News Station. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For…
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Books Author Blog: My Biggest Love
Earlier, David Ehrlich wrote about the shared culture, language, and fate of Israelis. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: My third book was published this week. Needless to say, I’m somewhere…
The Latest
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Books Author Blog: Only in Israel
David Ehrlich has published two books of short stories in Hebrew, “18 Blue” and “Tuesday and Thursday Mornings.” His newest book, “Who Will Die Last: Stories of Life in Israel,” is now available. His bookstore-cafe in Jerusalem, Tmol-Shilshom, is a haven for avant garde artists and writers, hosting readings by authors such as David Grossman,…
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When the Second Verse Is Same as the First in Hebrew
From Ben Zion Katz of Chicago comes this email: “The noted Italian rabbi Leon de Modena (1571-1648) accomplished a linguistic tour de force by writing an octet, entitled Kina Sh’mor, that made sense whether read as Hebrew or Italian. My brother Jeffrey and I have written a poem that does the same with Hebrew and…
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Moyshe the Shtarker, Jewish Gangster, Stabbed and Shot
100 years ago Gangster Stabbed and Shot Morris Reich, better known on the Lower East Side as Moyshe the Shtarker, was standing in front of a pool hall and smoking a cigar on Avenue B near Eighth Street last Thursday afternoon when three young men walked up to him, seemingly in order to engage him…
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How Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce Changed Judaism Forever
● Jewhooing the Sixties by David E. Kaufman Brandeis University Press, 360 pages, $36 The final week of September 1961 proved to be an auspicious one in American Jewish history — or, at least, in the history of Jewish-American celebrities. Within a matter of just a few days, Sandy Koufax set his first National League…
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David Copperfield’s Magical Relationship With God and Judaism
In the September 9, 1928, edition of the Forverts, a story with the headline “Leading American Magicians are Jews” opened with the following lede: “When a Jew rolls up his sleeves it doesn’t always mean business. It means magic.” With many Jews already working as magicians back in the day, there was every expectation that…
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Franz Kafka’s Birthday Offers Kafkaesque Dilemma
● Kafka: The Years of Insight By Reiner Stach Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Princeton University Press, $35, 720 pages In September 1913, Franz Kafka, employee of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Prague and recently the author of two flawless, utterly disturbing stories — “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” — took a…
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Buddha Meets the Kabbalah in San Francisco
Barnett Newman’s steel sculpture “Zim Zum 1” typically resides on the roof of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It now sits across the street, on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where it is the first piece to confront viewers of the exhibit “Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in…
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Books Lynda Obst vs. Hollywood
Lynda Obst is a Hollywood insider but not a fan of what she sees happening in Tinseltown. A former editor of The New York Times Magazine, she became a successful producer, with such films as “The Fisher King” and “Sleepless in Seattle” to her credit. But at some point, Obst realized that she wasn’t in…
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Books On Franz Kafka’s Birthday, Looking Through Lens of his Sexuality
● Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt By Saul Friedländer Yale University Press, 224 pages, $25 If ever there was an author whose works resisted analysis, it’s Franz Kafka. What does it mean, after all, that Gregor Samsa wakes up in “The Metamorphosis” and finds himself turned into a bug? In “Franz Kafka:…
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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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Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
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Music Jill Sobule was as much a Jewish icon as a queer one
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