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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Must-See Summer Festivals in Israel
Tourists heading to Israel hit an all-time high in the first quarter of 2012. From January through March, 637,200 tourists arrived in Israel, up 2% compared with the same period last year. While part of the uptick is due to factors out of Israel’s control, such as economic recovery, large numbers of tourists are being…
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Books Etgar Keret Gets Streetwise
While Etgar Keret, the Israeli novelist and screenwriter, was in the country to promote his latest book “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories,” he went for a walk with the Forward’s Dan Friedman. Keret — the writer The New York Times called a “genius” and the man Salman Rushdie referred to as “the voice…
The Latest
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Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Once upon a time, there were only a few ways to rest your head during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There were kibbutzim — which often required a week or month or year of volunteer work. There were campgrounds, though they required gear. There was the elderly cousin’s couch in central Tel Aviv, but…
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Man in Search of God
Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine By Eric Weiner Twelve, 368 pages, $26.99 I’ll be honest: I normally hate books like this — memoirs of spiritual tourism, jauntily retold by trustworthy but neurotic narrators who are careful never to be more knowledgeable than the reader. I have read about two dozen of these…
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Books Author Blog: Historians, Biographers
Dr. Abigail Green is the author of “Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero.” 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: What makes a good biography? I thought about this question a lot…
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Looking Back: May 11, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward A Philadelphia sweatshop exploded into chaos as two sewing machine operators got into a vicious fight. As workers received their bundles of piecework in the morning at Dotkin’s shop on South Street, Louis Getor thought that Samuel Ravitz’s bundle was bigger than his, so he began complaining about it,…
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Acronyms and the Bible
In response to my column of two weeks ago in which I objected to the use by Jews of the term “Old Testament,” several of you have expressed the opinion that the best alternative to it is “Hebrew Bible.” Miriam Segall of Minneapolis, on the other hand, wants to get even more Jewish that that….
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Adam Yauch and the Adolescent Sublime
Of all the Beastie Boys, I had the least attachment to Adam Yauch. It’s important to say this at the beginning because it’s impossible to talk about the Beastie Boys as individuals without talking about the group, and it’s impossible to talk about them as a band — to talk about their music — without…
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Books Author Blog: Blazing Saddles It Wasn’t
Earlier this week, Gerald Kolpan shared the story behind Eli Gershonson, a photo gallery of some of the historical figures in his novel, and the story behind how he came to write “Magic Words.” His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog…
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Jews Are a ‘Race,’ Genes Reveal
Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People By Harry Ostrer Oxford University Press, 288 Pages, $24.95 In his new book, “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People,” Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, claims that Jews are different, and the differences are not…
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Britain’s Jewish Press Baroness
The First Lady of Fleet Street: The Life of Rachel Beer — Crusading Heiress and Newspaper Pioneer Bantam Books, 348 pages, $30 By Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren In an era when women were not permitted to vote, when marriage was the only vocation that proper girls were encouraged to pursue, when doctors linked too…
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