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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Lost Jews of Africa
Filmmaker Laurence Gavron is on a journey to document lost Jewish tribes in Africa. The French-born Gavron, who has made Senegal her home since 1989, says she was immediately taken by the project, which she says combines her passion for Africa with the mystery of rediscovering Judaism. The film, titled “Black Jews, Juifs noir en…
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Hillels Stage College Drives To Save Lives
For Ohio University senior Lauren Kahn, the most significant test of her college career wasn’t a term paper or a final exam. It was a quick swab on the inside of her cheek her sophomore year, an easy, painless way to gather genetic information for a national database of potential bone marrow donors. On February…
The Latest
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Genetic Screening Is Increasingly Complicated
One in four people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is a carrier of at least one Jewish genetic disease. If both parents carry a recessive gene for the same disease, such as Tay-Sachs, each child has a 25% chance of having that disease. With such high risk factors in the Jewish community, many couples choose to…
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A (Kosher) Can of Worms
From the hulking Willamette meteorite to the sparkling Star of India sapphire, visitors to the American Museum of Natural History in New York are used to seeing unusual sights. But museum-goers last year were likely unprepared for the sight — and smell — of Rabbi Chaim Loike, as he walked past the ticket booths carrying…
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Books Author Blog: Hunting Family Ghosts
Doreen Carvajal’s first book, “The Forgetting River,” is about her search to recover her Catholic family’s hidden Sephardic Jewish roots in a mystical white pueblo on Spain’s southern frontier in Andalusia. 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…
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Books Novelist Explores Love, Sorcery And The Talmud
With her new book, “Rav Hisda’s Daughter: Book 1, Apprentice,” Maggie Anton, author of the “Rashi’s Daughters” trilogy, unearths a different chapter of Jewish history, giving readers a peek into what life may have been like for a Jewish woman in 3rd century Babylonia. Weaving together research on the religious life and culture, the sociology…
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Get Help for Genetic Diseases
Here is a list of instutions that provide treatment and support and testing for Jewish genetic diseases. Bachmann-Strauss Dystonia & Parkinson Foundation 551 Fifth Avenue, Suite 520 New York, NY 10176 (212) 682-9900 Fax: (212) 682- 6156 www.dystonia-parkinson.org Bachmann-Strauss Dystonia & Parkinson Foundation funds scientific research seeking to understand the causes of and find potential…
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Remembering Classmate David Rakoff
“Since you contacted me, I’ve been thinking a lot more about Bialik,” David Rakoff told me when I interviewed him two years ago for a piece I was writing for The Jerusalem Report. He was referring to Bialik Hebrew Day School, the Labor Zionist day school in Toronto we both attended as children. It was…
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The Disappearing Yiddish Accent
They say that Yiddish has been dying for the past 200 years. Up until about 50 or 60 years ago, saying as much was kind of a crude bluff, but now it would be a lie to say that Yiddish hasn’t been severely diminished. According to UNESCO’s most recent list of endangered languages, Yiddish falls…
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A Young Couple Tests Compatibility
The night Jeremy made me a raft and a river out of cardboard was when I first told him I loved him. By the time he proposed to me — after a scavenger hunt through New York City, on a boat in Central Park — we already knew we were going to get married. Like…
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Our Favorite Heretic
Romantic rehabilitations of Jewish history’s most notorious heretic, Baruch Spinoza, seem — like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) — to be without end. German romantics crowned this radical unbeliever a “God-intoxicated man.” Zionists claimed the excommunicant as an ideological ancestor of modern Jewish nationalism. The array of uses and misuses of Spinoza by…
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