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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Giving Voice to Kabbalah Masters
The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse From the Jewish Tradition Translated and annotated by Peter Cole Co-edited and with an afterword by Aminadav Dykman Yale University Press, 544 pages, $30 ‘There among the trees of God / … I’d enter the sacred shrine of the woods / … And as I sat at the edge…
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Books Author Blog: Why I Write
Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel “No One Is Here Except All of Us,” published by Riverhead Books. 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: Maybe there are four or…
The Latest
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Sisters in Skivvies on the Lower East Side
Unterzakhn By Leela Corman Schocken, 208 pages, $24.95 Click to enlarge.
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What Should We Call Christian Bible?
Last week I dealt with the New American Haggadah, edited by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. A few days after writing the column, I noticed an op-ed by Foer in The New York Times in which he discussed the new Haggadah in light of his evolving relationship with Jewish tradition. Speaking about how raising children has…
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‘Homegrown’ Story of West Coast Jews
On my laptop I have a scan of a photo of my grandfather that always makes me smile. It’s not just the snap-brim fedora and my grandfather’s relatively unlined face; it’s also the car behind him, a giant, four-door, butterscotch-colored Buick that he bought for cash in the early 1970s. I have a host of…
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Meeting Fearless Dissidents Over Burgers
The fearless refuseniks who attempted to hijack an airplane on June 15, 1970, in Leningrad in order to draw attention to the plight of Soviet Jews were “Zionist hooligans” to Soviet authorities, but to the writer Gal Beckerman they are nothing less than superheroes. In the summer of 2006, Beckerman found himself at a barbecue…
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For Carlo Ginzburg, It’s Personal
A collection of essays by the profoundly original, intellectually wide-ranging, Italian-Jewish historian Carlo Ginzburg underlines the influence of Yiddishkeit on his achievement. “Threads and Traces: True False Fictive,” published recently by University of California Press, is an illuminating collection of chapters, deftly translated from the original Italian by Anne C. and John Tedeschi. An omnivorous…
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Books Author Blog: Bageling
Earlier this week Rav Ron Yitzchok Eisenman wrote about an unexpected Hava Nagila moment and about his disdain for the phrase: “How’s Everything?” 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: Have you…
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Looking Back: April 20, 2012
100 Years Ago in the Forward Fifteen minutes after the end of a matinee performance of “Her First Child,” Liptzin Theater manager Michael Mintz committed suicide on the theater’s stage. Mintz had been helping his wife, famed actress Kenny Liptzin, prepare for the evening performance of “Mirele Efros” at a theater in New Jersey. He…
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Books Six Words Is All it Takes
“Circumcision has been least challenging part.” “God chose. Said no. Now what? “Sunday night? Yes, lobster is kosher.” Millions of words, over thousands of years, have been written about the nature of the Jewish soul. But the most precise distillation of our people’s essence may have finally arrived in fewer characters than a tweet. “Six…
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Books Author Blog: How’s Everything?
Earlier this week Rav Ron Yitzchok Eisenman wrote about an unexpected Hava Nagila moment. 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: Yesterday a man came to see me for an appointment. As…
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