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 The Most Jewish Thing I Do
Enter to win a copy of Helene Wecker’s debut novel “The Golem and the Jinni” here. Her 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: When I started looking through the extensive and awe-inspiring…
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Nothing Beat the Spa for Wealthy 19th Century Jews
The upper crust of Eastern and Central European Jews in the 19th century had a solution when their lives became too stressful. They opted for health cures in spa towns, especially at one of three tourist paradises built around local natural mineral waters full of dissolved carbon dioxide that were considered particularly salubrious. In the…
The Latest
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Books Giving a Voice — and a Name — to Noah’s Wife
These days, we attend more closely to the role of our biblical matriarchs. But while Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel occupy the spotlight, most of us haven’t thought much about another female antecedent: Noah’s wife. Rebecca Kanner’s new novel, “Sinners and the Sea,” imagines the experiences of that woman. In a recent interview with The…
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Is Rise of Jewish Fundamentalism Endangering Israeli Democracy?
● The War Within: Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Threat to Democracy and the Nation Yuval Elizur and Lawrence Malkin Overlook Press, 224 pages, $26.95 As my 17-year-old son said, “This book could double as Yair Lapid’s Tanach.” And he’s not wrong. One of the many merits of Yuval Elizur’s and Lawrence Malkin’s “The War Within: Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox…
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How Adam Kadmon Made the Leap From The Kabbalah to Italian Television
Just who is the mysterious and much talked about Italian television personality and conspiracy theorist Adam Kadmon, who always appears on TV with a mask to hide his identity? Is he an imaginative Italian investigative journalist? The descendant, as he claims to be, of an ancient family endowed with mystical powers, stemming from seven androids…
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Yitzhak Ben Zvi Memorialized
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75 and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illuminating and edifying clippings from the Jewish past. 100 years ago 1913 Walery Waszkewicz, a Polish resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was murdered…
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Why Susan Steinberg May Be the Best Jewish Writer You’ve Never Read
● Spectacle By Susan Steinberg Graywolf Press, 152 pages, $14 In the current literary environment — conservative by inclination, market-driven by intention — it’s often hard to see the true accomplishment of a work of fiction through the buzz and packaging that surrounds it. The book is a product targeted toward a pre-existing class of…
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Books Author Blog: Almost Jewish
Earlier this week, Allison Amend wrote about the Jewish connection to art. Her 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: So why would a nice Jewish girl not write nice Jewish fiction? My…
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Haifa Museum Brings Outsider Artists Inside the World of Israeli Art
When she was seeking out works for what would be the first exhibition of outsider and naive art in Israel, Ruti Direktor, chief curator at the Haifa Museum of Art, received a negative reply from the Collection de l’Art Brut (Collection of Raw Art), in Lausanne, Switzerland. The administrators of the collection (which was initiated…
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Retelling Jewish American Story Through History of Cinema
● The American Jewish Story Through Cinema By Eric A. Goldman University of Texas Press, 264 pages, $55. Eric A. Goldman’s look at about a dozen Hollywood movies released between 1927 and 2009 can be recommended especially to readers who don’t flinch when they ponder his book’s title. For me, the very notion of postulating…
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Thriller Writer Janice Steinberg Preaches Gospel of Second Chances
● The Tin Horse By Janice Steinberg Random House, 352 pages, $26 At 85, Elaine Greenstein Resnick, “a brisk, no-bullshit woman” who worked as a civil rights attorney, is downsizing as she prepares to enter a retirement community. The University of Southern California, which wants her papers, has provided an eager young archivist to help…
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