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 The Gourmet’s Kids Ate Junk
Earlier this week, Efrat Libfroind wrote about her tribe; cooking and self-improvement; being a mother and a full-time pastry chef; and being the only kosher cooking student in class. Her new cookbook, “Kosher Elegance: The Art of Cooking With Style,” is now available. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite,…
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Books Nica Rothschild, the Patron (Saint) of Jazz
NICA’S DREAM: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE JAZZ BARONESS David Kastin W. W. Norton, 272 pages, $26.95 Pannonica Rothschild, or “Nica,” as she was called, tried very hard to be an upstanding member of the famous Jewish banking family. She went to the right schools, married the right man (a French baron, no less),…
The Latest
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Sholem Aleichem in America
Though Sholem Aleichem is widely known for his depictions of Eastern European shtetl life, the famed Yiddish writer spent a number of years living and writing in America. In a new documentary titled “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness,” director Joseph Dorman details the life of Sholem Aleichem, from his early successes to his many,…
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Books My Tribe
Earlier this week, Efrat Libfroind wrote about cooking and self-improvement, being a mother and a full-time pastry chef and the only kosher cooking student in class. Her new cookbook, “Kosher Elegance: The Art of Cooking With Style,” is now available. Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite, courtesy of the…
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Bryna Wasserman Picked To Lead National Jewish Theater
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” But there are second acts, apparently, in Yiddish theater lives. In late June, the National Yiddish Theatre — Folksbiene announced that Bryna Wasserman, formerly the head of Montreal’s Segal Centre for Performing Arts, will take over as executive director, joining the Folksbiene’s artistic…
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Books New York’s Oldest Anarchist Book Club Tries To Get Organized
Here’s an unusual story: anarchists in search of order. Bill Weinberg, a former WBAI radio host, is working to save the Libertarian Book Club, founded by Jewish and Italian anarchists in 1946. A recent ad in The Brooklyn Rail reads: “[I]n dire straits: about to lose our office at the old Peace Pentagon (339 Lafayette)…
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July 8, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Of the numerous strange hobos who populate Manhattan’s Jewish Lower East Side, none, perhaps, is stranger than the man known only as “Moyshe,” who occupies a stoop on Chrystie Street near the corner of Broome. Known as the “mayor” of Chrystie Street, Moyshe sits on his stoop every day of…
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Scant Dishing From a Print Pooh-bah
Lives and Letters By Robert Gottlieb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $30 There is something poignant in reading a collection like this, one that comprises mainly long, discursive reviews of long, intelligent books about long-dead people. Our author is a notable man of letters, the former editor in chief of both Simon & Schuster…
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It Is Not Over The Sea That You Shall Ask Who Shall Fetch It
Literary Passports: The Making Of Modernist Hebrew Fiction In Europe By Shachar M. Pinsker, Stanford University Press, 504 Pages, $60 American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity In The United States By Michael Weingrad Syracuse University Press, 280 pages, $34.95 Since the 1783 founding of the journal HaMeasef in East Prussia, the Diaspora has been…
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What He Contributed, What He Endured
On May 29, at the Théâtre d’Orléans, a gala concert, Hommage à Jean Zay, paid tribute to a minister of education and fine arts in the 1930s government of French-Jewish socialist Léon Blum, whose lasting impact on French culture is being newly celebrated. Son of a left-wing Jewish newspaper editor in north-central France, Zay was…
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Walk Softly and Carry a Big Shtick
The contemporary American vernacular has dozens of Yiddish words in it, most of which — maven, schlep, kosher, etc., etc. — mean pretty much the same thing in English as they do in Yiddish. Occasionally, though, Yiddish words domesticated in English have taken on new meanings. This is a natural linguistic process, even though to…
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