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 Serious Biblical Thought, in Paperback
Avivah Zornberg’s classic studies of Genesis and Exodus are now available in paperback. That itself is a strange thing, because if you enter the home of most scholars of ancient Jewish texts, the books lining their walls will be leather-bound volumes with titles printed on the spine in gold or silver lettering — a Jewish…
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Books A Sukkah Occupies Wall Street
Last week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote about Sukkot and social justice and asked discussed the importance of place. Her posts are being featured this week 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: As I write this blog…
The Latest
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Taking Politics Out of the Trotsky Debate
Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life By Joshua Rubenstein Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25 During much of the 20th century, Leon Trotsky’s legacy was a source of strife on both the left and right — and 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the scholarly controversy surrounding Trotsky has yet to fall into…
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Books Does Place Matter?
Last week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote about Sukkot and social justice. Her most recent book, “Where Justice Dwells: A Hands-On Guide to Doing Social Justice in Your Jewish Community” is now available. Her posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog…
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‘Protect Life Act’ Continues the War on Women
While the economy stagnates and many additional issues ought to be at the top of their agenda, House Republicans are still fixated on policing the uteruses of America. The “War on Women,” the name given to an onslaught of state and federal laws that have restricted abortion, birth control and women’s health care in an…
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Books Yid Lit: Jeffery Eugenides
It’s rare to find a novelist and Ivy League professor on a billboard in Times Square. Though Jeffrey Eugenides rises above Broadway in wind-blown clothes, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex” and “The Virgin Suicides” is a soft-spoken Michigan native who describes himself as equal parts hillbilly and Greek. In his new novel, “The…
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Bearing Silent Witness
Until the Dawn’s Light By Aharon Appelfeld, Translated by Jeffrey M. Green Schocken Books, 240 pages, $26 ‘Until the Dawn’s Light” opens with a mother and son on the run. What they are escaping, as they travel by train from city to city across Europe, is revealed only just before the novel’s end. But there’s…
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An American Landscape Architect and His Sabra Designs
In tough economic times, parents may think twice about splashing out on a once-in-a-lifetime spectacular bar mitzvah voyage. But “A Life Spent Changing Places,” a posthumously published memoir by the American Jewish landscape designer Lawrence Halprin, who died in 2009 at age 93, offers justification for wild splurging. When the Bronx-born and Brooklyn-raised Halprin’s 13th…
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Bringing Modern Dance Down to Earth
Noa Wertheim stands onstage with the Vertigo Dance Company, adjusting a dancer’s leg and redirecting a turn. If she disagrees with a step, her head shakes a cascade of wispy, brown hair into her eyes. Wertheim is an architect. She constructs an edifice of movement, pattern and line. Working toward perfection in every rehearsal, she…
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Polish Play About Anti-Semitism Debuts in America
A passing nod. A borrowed cup of sugar. A shared fence. A watchful eye on the house. That’s what neighbors are for. But what happens when neighbors turn and become enemies? That’s the question that consumed Warsaw-based playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek on learning that the black-and-white Polish Holocaust history he had learned at school was actually…
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Mixed Metaphors, Conflicts and Sex at Venice Film Fest
For the 11 days of the 68th Venice International Film Festival, which ran in September, the stars walked the red carpet of the Palazzo del Cinema, the main cinema venue adorned with flags of the 35 countries represented at this year’s installment of the world’s oldest film fest. From the middle of the building billowed…
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