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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An Angry Old Artist Reaches the Big Apple
The Jewish artist Gustav Metzger, longtime resident of the United Kingdom, has long been an inspired artistic equivalent of the orators seen and heard at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, uninhibited deliverers of social and political messages. Born in 1926, Metzger the artistic orator finally has his first solo American exhibit, “Gustav Metzger: Historic…
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Books Joachim Neugroschel, Prolific Multilingual Translator, Is Dead at 73
The prolific literary translator Joachim Neugroschel died on May 23 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 73. Neugroschel translated more than 200 books from Yiddish, French, German, Russia and Italian, including the work of Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti. His legal guardian and former partner, Aaron Mack Schloff, confirmed Neugroschel’s death. The son of the Yiddish Galician…
The Latest
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Books Campy Lizards, or, A Look Back to My Literary Beginnings
Earlier this week, C. Alexander London wrote about being an accidental adventurer and sequels and the Torah. His blog 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: In honor of the end…
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Roth’s Latest Award Comes, of Course, With a Complaint
Unless he wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, Philip Roth will win no bigger international literary award than the Man Booker International Prize that was announced May 18. As well as being worth £60,000 ($100,000) to the winner, the International Prize has become an instant milepost on the world literary circuit due to the importance…
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Roth’s Last Word, or That of His ‘Nemesis’
Philip Roth was the guest of honor at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research the night it was announced he won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. Remarks by scholars at that event are excerpted below. Scars Without End STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish culture and history at Stanford…
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Books Cities of Jewish Success, Crushed
JEWISH BIALYSTOK AND ITS DIASPORA By Rebecca Kobrin Indiana University Press, 380 pages, $24.95 GERMAN CITY, JEWISH MEMORY: THE STORY OF WORMS By Nils Roemer Brandeis University Press, 328 pages, $35 A vast, heartbreaking and, to English readers, inaccessible Yiddish and Hebrew library — of some 1,000 volumes, studded with unique memoirs and rare photographs…
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Reading in Your PJs
This fall, a non-Jewish publisher called Margery Cuyler intends to launch the first four titles of a new Shofar series of children’s books. Although Cuyler isn’t Jewish, she told the Forward that she has always been interested in publishing Judaica. Then she reeled off her debut titles — “The Golem’s Latkes,” “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah,” “Many…
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Sha Boli, China’s Jewish Translator, Writer and Movie Actor
On a muggy day last year, I biked through Beijing’s gray-brick hutong, backstreet alleyways, beneath a smoggy sky. My front basket ferried a batch of fresh bagels bought from an entrepreneurial expatriate New Yorker. A nosh is the usual price of entry for a chat with Sidney Shapiro, one of Chinese literature’s pre-eminent translators into…
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The Age of Idealism, Debunked
WE HAD IT SO GOOD By Linda Grant Scribner, 336 pages, $25 ‘The personal is political” was the political headline for the international feminist movement, and it could just as well be the takeaway phrase of this intriguing new work by British novelist Linda Grant. Chronicling three generations among families, Grant, a former journalist-turned-novelist known…
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Yid Lit: Linda Grant
Forward contributor Jo-Ann Mort speaks to Orange Prize-winning novelist Linda Grant about her new novel, “We Had It So Good.” In it, Grant uses the story of an American Jew in Britain to illuminate how baby boomers’ hippie beginnings actually led them to more traditional professions and lives of conspicuous consumption. Read Jo-Ann Mort’s review…
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Kiev Jewry’s Temporary Triumph Over Adversity
Kiev: Jewish Metropolis. A History, 1859-1914 By Natan M. Meir Indiana University Press, 424 pages, $27.95 Natan Meir’s meticulous new history of Kiev Jewry in the modern period, is an assiduous work of conventional scholarship. Meir provides a thorough, lucid and ultimately heartrending account of the noble successes of Kiev’s Jews in building a solid…
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