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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A Guide for the Judgmental
A reader wishing to be identified only as “Harry” has a question about the Mishnaic tractate of Pirkei Avot or — as it is often called in English — “The Ethics of the Fathers.” (The Hebrew title literally means “Chapters of the Fathers,” the book being divided into six chapters in which many of the…
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‘Girls,’ Sex and the All New JAP
Within her first two minutes on screen, it’s evident that Shoshanna Shapiro is a Jewish American Princess. From perfectly coiffed hair to a pink Juicy Couture tracksuit to her admission that her parents are paying $2,100 a month for her Nolita apartment, Shoshanna, one of the four protagonists on the HBO show “Girls” — which…
The Latest
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Life in British Mandate Palestine
Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel By Hadara Lazar Atlas & Co., 304 pages, $25.95 Another book on “the making of Israel”? It was a scant few months ago that Gershom Gorenberg’s provocative and timely book, “The Unmaking of Israel,” was visited on the Jewish body politic. Now comes novelist Hadara Lazar’s book,…
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The Silver Age of Rock and Roll
Call it the “Mad Men” syndrome: These days, we’re nostalgic for other people’s youth. The symptoms present themselves most clearly when it comes to music. Since the world went digital, the recording industry has spent a lot of time in the vaults, coming up with packages that are meant to appeal to the completist in…
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Books To Vitebsk and Back Again
“Do the dead know that life still exists, somewhere?” the 17-year-old literature-loving, sex-obsessed Samuel Glass asks in “The Odyssey of Samuel Glass.” Since his adored father’s sudden death, he is desperate to leave the confines of his north London suburban home. His desire to “get away from the doom-laden cloud that pervaded the house” is…
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Death in Petrópolis
Viennese-born Jewish author Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide together as refugees in Brazil in February 1942, but Zweig’s works, whether fiction, biographies or letters, have never seemed more alive. Seventy years on, the former home in Petrópolis where he died, now known as Casa Stefan Zweig, is scheduled to [open…
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Hasidic Tales and Prayer-Poems
A Hidden Light: Stories and Teachings of Early HaBaD and Bratzlav Hasidism By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi with Netanel Miles-Yepez Gaon Books, 490 pages, $31.95 All Breathing Life Adores Your Name: At the Interface Between Poetry and Prayer By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi Gaon Books, 212, pages, $18.95 In her introduction to “A Hidden Light,” Susannah Heschel notes that…
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Books Nabokov’s Dystopic ‘Bend Sinister’ Turns 65
It’s hard to imagine Vladimir Nabokov as a commercial failure. Yet that was precisely what happened with his second English-language work, the nightmarish and satirical dystopian novel “Bend Sinister,” which celebrates its 65th anniversary today. Originally titled “The Person from Porlock,” then “Game to Gunm[etal]” and later “Solus Rex,” “Bend Sinister” was Nabokov’s first novel…
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Copywriters at the Gates
At the onset of the fifth season of the critically beloved AMC ad agency drama “Mad Men,” a new Jewish copywriter, Michael Ginsberg, becomes the bright creative light of the office, while Abe Drexler, a secondary character dating another copywriter, is outed as a member of the tribe by using the word “bracha.” Then the…
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How To Get a Haircut in Lvov
Herb Hoffman writes: “When as a child I needed a haircut — desperately, according to my mother — she would say, ‘Azoy a shmenge oyf den kopp, a mameshe choprene.’ This always seemed to me more Polish or German than Yiddish. She herself came from Lvov and knew all three languages. What is the derivation?”…
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Books Author Blog: Jewish People and Books
Earlier this week, Yehuda Kurtzer wrote about a recent Commentary article by Jack Wertheimer and the transmission of memory. 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: Do the Jewish People need more…
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Music After decades of waiting, we’re finally getting a Bob Dylan-Barbra Streisand duet
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