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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The Jews Who Plumbed Hitler’s Brain
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts By Daniel Pick Oxford University Press, 368 pages, $35 More than 20 years ago, Neal Gabler declared that Hollywood was the creation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In his remarkable book “An Empire of Their Own,” Gabler in fact suggested that the Meyers…
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Good Night, Vienna
Vienna-born potter Lucie Rie, who is the subject of Emmanuel Cooper’s biography “Lucie Rie: Modernist Potter,” shows how a Jewish artist can express Yiddishkeit in creativity despite repeated assimilations. Rie, who lived from 1902 to 1995, was the daughter of Dr. Benjamin Gomperz, an ear, nose and throat specialist and a friend of Sigmund Freud….
The Latest
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David Brooks Channels ‘Perplexed’ Maimonides
A column on the Obama-Romney race by political and social commentator David Brooks in the August 20 New York Times bore the caption “Guide for the Perplexed.” Brooks was trying to give some helpful counsel to undecided voters trying to make up their minds, and either he or the editors of the column thought this…
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The Sacred and the Profane
In a 1935 review of “Porgy and Bess,” Virgil Thomson, one of America’s most distinguished music critics, famously dismissed George Gershwin’s music as a form of “gefilte fish orchestration,” harshly consigning it to the ghetto of Jewish music rather than situating it within the broad expanse of American culture. Lazare Saminsky, Thomson’s contemporary and a…
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Books Author Blog: The Presence of the Past
Earlier this week, Kati Marton wrote about the French Jewish family the Camondos and Paris’s black marble plaques. 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: Now that I live part-time in Paris,…
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Exile on Second Street
Director Chantal Akerman was back on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was standing in front of her audience at Anthology Film Archives, a film society so hip that there was a line of people around the block, still waiting to get into the screening of her newest movie, “La Folie Almayer,” a very loose adaptation…
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Books Author Blog: Remembering the Camondos
Earlier this week, Kati Marton wrote about Paris’s black marble plaques and the subject of race in France. 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: Now that I live part-time in Paris,…
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Rethinking Holocaust Education
I am the grandchild of three Holocaust survivors. My grandfather had the line of numbers tattooed on his arm, and they all had the terrible memories, the terrible losses. During my middle school years, now a decade ago, many of us went through what we consider our Holocaust phase. I read every book on the…
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The Dybbuks Made Me Do It
If there had been stand-up comedy in the shtetl, “The dybbuk made me do it!” could very well have been a popular catchphrase. The myth of an innocent person turning to evil because a demon has taken possession of his or her body is common to all cultures, but it has deep roots in Jewish…
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Digital Learners Can’t Do It On Own
You know me, right? I’m the one you call to fix your computer or set the clock in your car, the one you can count on to have the latest electronic gadgets. But I am coming to you now as an educator with the unique privilege (and challenge) of working with today’s generation of so-called…
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Technology’s Limits in Education
We live in a world fascinated — one might even say obsessed — with technology. In an age of smartphones and even “smart” kitchen appliances, it is no surprise that the allure of technology has touched the field of education as well. Some of the new initiatives in using technology in schools have been driven…
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