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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Books Author Blog: Stumbling Stones
Leslie Maitland is the author of Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed. 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: . In 1989 I accompanied…
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Peace Process? Fuhgeddaboudit!
The daily English edition of the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz, which also appears in an Internet version, has always struck me as a prodigious feat of translation. Day after day — or, more precisely, night after night — a battery of anonymous translators, working like galley slaves under enormous time pressure, takes the Hebrew paper, itself…
The Latest
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Sumptuous Feast for Jewish Studies
Gender and Jewish History Edited by Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore Indiana University Press, 428 pages, $27.95 Imagine sitting down for delicious tapas at a long table with a group of old friends. The flavors are nuanced and varied, while the conversation is lively, provocative and deeply engaging. Reading “Gender and Jewish History,”…
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Books Day Schools and the End of the Melting Pot
Earlier this week, Jonathan Krasner discussed his use of the word “boys” and the magic of summer camp. 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: I met Peter Beinart in 1999 when…
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Murder Most Lovely
The success of the tabloid — epitomized but not monopolized by the besieged citadel of Murdoch — relies, for the most part, on two things: the rhythmic titillation of its headlines, and eye-catching photographs of things not meant to be seen. Writing, it need not be said, is beside the point. Flip through the pages…
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Finding Jewish Life in Eastern Europe
Pavel Fried was born in the village of Třebíč, Czechoslovakia, in 1930. Fried lived a middle-class Jewish life; he was in the midst of preparations for his bar mitzvah when his family was deported to Terezin. In the camp, he told interviewers from the Vienna-based oral history project Centropa, he had a secret ceremony. Pavel…
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Looking Back: June 1, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward Through an advertisement he placed in the Forverts, Berel Cohn found his father, Avrom Yingerman, whom he hasn’t seen in 25 years. Yingerman, who hails from the Polish town Brisk, divorced his wife 25 years ago and left her and their three children in Poland. He went to New…
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Cultural Critic or Complainer-in-Chief?
Farther Away By Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $26 On the last page of the last essay in his new collection, “Farther Away,” Jonathan Franzen bombards the reader with a rapid-fire list of provocative and typically Franzenian questions: What is the point of meaning — especially literary meaning — in a rabid…
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Books Author Blog: The Magic of Summer Camp
Earlier this week, National Jewish Book Award winner Jonathan Krasner discussed his use of the word “boys” in “Benderly boys.” 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: When my 10-year-old daughter heads…
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Hey, Mr. Banana Man
The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King By Rich Cohen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages, $27 The cover of Rich Cohen’s engrossing tale of the life of Sam Zemurray shows a banana sprouting from Zemurray’s head like a big curved penis. If you accept that analogy, then…
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Pleasant, Pleasanter and Pleasanter-er
Rabbi Richard Hammerman of Caldwell, N.J., writes about my column of May 4, in which I said it was “pleasanter” to contemplate the origins of the expression “finger-lickin’ good” than it was to contemplate an Iranian nuclear bomb: “I always enjoy your columns and learn something new and often useful from them. But ‘pleasanter,’ not…
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