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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Finding Passover Wisdom In The Work of Rainier Maria Rilke
Is a question profound if it has no answer? I reflected on this banality the morning after another draining Passover Seder while shuffling — fashionably late and slightly hung over — to a synagogue I found hopeful in the past. In my usual house of worship I would be recruited to lead the service in…
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HBO Documentary Tells Story of Kindertransport That Saved 50 Children
**EDITOR’S NOTE: In honor of the 75th anniversary of the kindertransports, we remember the dramatic story of 50 Jewish children’s rescue from the Nazis, which started in Vienna and wound up Philadelphia. ** In early January of 1939, New York businessman Louis Levine traveled to Philadelphia to meet with Gilbert Kraus, the man he believed…
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Books The Man Who Made the Soundtrack to Our Lives
It’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on the television lately without running into Clive Davis. He is promoting his memoir, “The Soundtrack of My Life” a book that might just as easily be called “The Soundtrack of Your Life.” Yes, you. Davis, 80, is a recording industry executive who helped start or…
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Books Graphic Novelist Returns to Berlin
Miriam Katin appears naked in one panel of “Letting It Go,” her new graphic memoir about coming to terms with her past as a Holocaust survivor. But the rest of this novel-length confessional comic is even more revealing. Her first full-length work since 2006’s award-winning Holocaust memoir “We Are On Our Own,” “Letting It Go”…
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How ‘Downton Abbey’ Plundered the Story of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
Lord Grantham is Tevye the Milkman. As the trials and tribulations marking the third season of BBC’s “Downton Abbey” came to a close, the realization hit me: Julian Fellowes has created a WASP version of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Despite obvious differences, the fundamental premise is identical: how a proud man with three daughters copes…
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Books How Do You Solve a Problem Like the VIDA Count?
Elissa Strauss is right to note that VIDA’s third annual count of male vs. female bylines in “thought leader magazines” created a reaction that, at first, amounted to a giant shrug. Over the past few years many writers, Elissa most notable among them, have asked editors to respond to “The Count.” Most did not take…
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Palestine Might Still Be A Better Name Than Israel
‘He’s not going to give up one inch of Eretz Israel,” New York Times columnist Roger Cohen quotes Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri as saying of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 15. And Cohen adds, by way of explanation, “Eretz Israel is a biblical term widely used to refer to the area between the…
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Forverts Prints 150,000 Copies Per Day
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 According to official figures, the Forverts has been selling 139,960 copies of…
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Books Rabbi Gafni’s Revenge
Earlier this week, Yuval Elizur examined religious political power in Israel and January’s elections and Lawrence Malkin discussed the tension between tradition and modernity in contemporary Judaism and its consequences. Today, Yuval Elizur reveals Rabbi Moshe Gafni’s powerful hand. Elizur and Malkin are the co-authors of the recently published “The War Within: Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox Threat…
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Books Should Jews Own Guns?
“Jews have been on the wrong end of the gun, the crossbow, and the sword forever,” a man tells Dan Baum over breakfast in Baum’s new book “Gun Guys: A Road Trip.” That man — Aaron Zelman, founder of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, “an organization widely revered by gun-rights activists as so…
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Passover, the Warsaw Ghetto, Sigmund Freud, and the Psychology of Bigotry
Even as it was happening, some appear to have understood the Holocaust as a new chapter in the old biblical story of the Exodus: The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began, history books tell us, on Passover eve, April 1943. The Passover holiday has certainly apprehended that history in hindsight. In their meditations on the…
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