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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Tending Bar and Talking Faith With Jewish Drinking Columnist Rosie Schaap
● Drinking With Men: A Memoir By Rosie Schaap Riverhead Books, 272 pages, $26.95 As Rosie Schaap remembers it, in 1987, at the age of 16, she took the advice of her guidance counselor and dropped out of high school to follow the Grateful Dead. She sold beads and tie-dyed T-shirts to support herself, went…
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Books Can Israel Help American Jews Recall Forgotten Heroes?
Earlier this week, M. M. Silver wrote about the riches in Louis Marshall’s archive. 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: Now that my previous blog post established to everyone’s complete satisfaction…
The Latest
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Books Sami Rohr Prize Finalists Announced
The Jewish Book Council has announced the finalists for this year’s Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The $100,000 prize is one of the largest literary awards in the world and recognizes emerging writers who examine the Jewish experience. It is given for fiction and non-fiction in alternating years. This year’s fiction finalists include Shani…
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Books Ben Schrank and Joshua Furst Debate Judaism and Art
Ben Schrank and author and frequent Forward contributor Joshua Furst met up at The Brooklyn Inn with the intention of drinking some beer and discussing fiction, Brooklyn and their complicated relationships with Jewishness. Schrank recently published his wise, big-hearted new novel, “Love Is a Canoe.” Since much of the story revolves around publishing and the…
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Books Author Blog: Obsession in Blue
Baruch and Judy Sterman’s “The Rarest Blue: The Remarkable Story of an Ancient Color Lost to History and Rediscovered” is now available. Their 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: We admit it,…
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‘Yip’ Harburg’s All-American Lyrics Came With a Heaping Helping of Yiddishkeit
Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist By Harriet Hyman Alonso Wesleyan Univeristy Press, 332 pages, $28.95 The tragic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” the idealistic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the raucous “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” were all co-written by the same American Jewish lyricist, E. Y. Harburg (1896–1981), and all owe…
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What Has He Done To Deserve This?
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked By James Lasdun Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $25 A small boy flees across a bridge. Assassins follow, begging for a taste of his blood to eat with dessert: “to top off the honey.” Eventually, the boy surrenders his head, submitting to his beheaders’ crazed illogic:…
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Books American Jewry’s Top 100 List
M. M. Silver is a modern Jewish history scholar at Max Stern College of Emek Yezreel in Israel. His newest book, “Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America: A Biography,” is now available. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s…
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How James Lasdun Found Himself Victimized by Anti-Semitic Cyber-Stalker
Victims of stalking are typically counseled to ignore their tormentors. Just as trying to banish an unwanted thought invariably lodges that thought in the mind, asking a stalker to stop often yields the counter effect — a fresh round of emails, phone calls, visits or letters. To the stalker, the contact is proof that her…
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Prisoner X and the Letter of Mystery
By now, unless you’re the type that refuses to follow the news (not that I blame you, but in that case, why are you reading this newspaper?), you know who “Prisoner X” is. Called “Mr. X” by the Israeli news service Ynet, which originally broke the story of his suicide in a high-security Israeli prison…
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Bertrand Russell Challenges Nikita Khrushchev on Anti-Semitism
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, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 As the Yiddish theater strike on Manhattan’s Lower East Side…
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