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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Fictionalizing the Holocaust
The Emperor of Lies By Steve Sem-Sandberg Translated by Sarah Death Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 664 pages, $30 Theodor Adorno famously wrote that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What, then, would he make of adaptations of the Holocaust itself — films and books that dramatize Jewish suffering during World War II? Sure…
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Essays Examine Primo Levi’s Humanism
Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism After the Fall Stanislao Pugliese, Editor Fordham University Press, 224 pages, $65 Mass deportation of European Jews to the killing metropolis of Auschwitz began in spring of 1942. By January of 1945, more than a million Jews had been murdered there by gas, torture, starvation, medical experimentation and…
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China’s Expert on Kabbalah and Jewish Literature
Ying Han was born in 1973 in Xi’an, the ancient capital of China where both of her parents served in the air force. When Ying was 7 months old, she was sent to her aunt’s home in a poor rural village in Hebei province. Ying remembers a struggle to live, where even white flour was…
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A Graphic Novel for Kids About Graphic Novelist
Lily Renee, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer By Trina Robbins, Illustrated by Anne Timmons and Mo Oh Graphic Universe, 96 pages, $7.95 A Graphic Review of the Book, by Miriam Katin:
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Books More Moses Than Job
A version of this article appeared in Yiddish, here. ‘I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left’: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky. By Marat Grinberg Academic Studies Press, 400 pages, $65 In the poem “Dream,” Boris Slutsky laconically summed up two defining facts of his generation:…
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Family History Seen Through Tenement Rooms
The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set On A Thousand Square Feet of The Lower East Side By Katharine Greider Public Affairs, 352 pages, $27 By the beginning of the 20th century, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, more densely populated than Calcutta. At the Tenement Museum on…
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Bride Shipped from Shtetl to South Dakota
The Little Bride: A Novel By Anna Solomon Riverhead Books, 320 pages, $15 In her classic 1912 memoir of immigration to the United States, “The Promised Land,” Mary Antin notes: “A long girlhood, a free choice in marriage, and a brimful of womanhood are the precious rights of an American woman.” Tell that to Minna…
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Looking Back: October 7
100 Years Ago in the Forward As 25-year-old Bronx resident Flora Kirsch was walking her 3-year-old son, Aaron, to the store, 35-year-old Jacob Spielman accosted her and began yelling at her. As she walked away, Spielman drew a revolver and began running toward her. Bystanders screamed for her to take cover, but her frightened boy…
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When the Ram’s Horn Sounds
Originally published in the Forward September 6, 2002. To adapt the famous categorization of Claude Levi-Strauss, if such wind instruments as clarinets and cornets are “cooked,” the shofar is definitely “raw.” The question arises: Why has this wild horn, the only biblical instrument still in use, come to represent so much to Jews, especially in…
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Books Praying Outdoors
Earlier this week, Stuart Nadler blogged for the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning‘s Author Blog about casting off one’s sins and the stories that didn’t make it. His 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…
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A Zionist Heroine in Her Own Mind
My Russian Grandmother and her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir By Meir Shalev, translated by Evan Fallenberg Schocken, 224 pages, $25.95 Few writers have a warmer place in the hearts of Israeli readers than Meir Shalev. His upbringing in Nahalal, Israel’s first moshav, inspired “The Blue Mountain,” one of the top best-sellers in Israeli…
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Culture Trump wants to honor Hannah Arendt in a ‘Garden of American Heroes.’ Is this a joke?
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Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
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Fast Forward AJC, USC Shoah Foundation announce partnership to document antisemitism since World War II
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אין זײַנע „פֿאָרווערטס“־אַרטיקלען האָט ער קריטיקירט זייער צוגאַנג צום חורבן און צו ייִדישקײט.
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Culture In a Haredi Jerusalem neighborhood, doctors’ visits are free, but the wait may cost you
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Fast Forward Chicago mayor donned keffiyeh for Arab Heritage Month event, sparking outcry from Jewish groups
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