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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Fiction Writers Facing a Pot of Gold
The winners of the 2011 Sami Rohr prize, the largest monetary award for Jewish writing, have been announced. This year’s finalists — all novelists, in keeping with the Jewish Council’s tradition of considering fiction and non-fiction books in alternating years — will be honored at a ceremony in New York on May 31. Austin Ratner…
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Books Roth the Invincible
A prolific novelist, Philip Roth, at 78, has authored 31 novels and received the most distinguished literary awards, including, most recently, the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to him yesterday despite heavy opposition from one of the judges, Carmen Calil. Calil, a feminist author and publisher, criticized Roth’s repetitiveness and resigned from the…
The Latest
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The Mississippi Floods: Punishment From an Angry God?
Is God punishing the Deep South? In the first half of May, a series of devastating tornadoes ripped through Alabama, and as this article goes to press, swaths of greater Memphis, Tenn., are underwater, and levees are being released all along the Mississippi River. Not surprisingly, the usual voices of theodicy have currently fallen silent….
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1964 Is Still Resounding
Can an oratorio about politics rise above the artistic level of occasional piece or mere propaganda? The question came to mind at New York City’s Carnegie Hall before I heard Jaap van Zweden masterfully conduct the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, its 70-voice chorus and four soloists in the May 11 New York premiere of a new…
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How To Live Like God in Odessa
Seth Cohen writes from Mamaroneck, N.Y.: “I just read, in [the Web site of] Jewish Ideas Daily, a review of a book about the history of Odessa. In it were mentioned two contrasting Jewish views of that city as expressed in the Yiddish sayings, lebn vi got in Odes, ‘to live like God in Odessa,…
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Laughing in the Face of Evil
Joseph Skibell’s third novel “A Curable Romantic” evokes the spirit of “Candide” with a Jewish postmodern twist in order to ask the same question as Voltaire: How can we be optimistic in the face of evil? Voltaire wrote “Candide” to revolt against Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism after experiencing the suffering of the Seven Years’…
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From ‘Chip ’n Dale’ to ‘Assassin’s Creed’
This year, the Writers Guild of America bestowed upon Aaron Sorkin, Matthew Weiner and Jeffrey Yohalem its 2011 head writer awards: Sorkin for the film “The Social Network,” Weiner and for the AMC series “Mad Men” and Yohalem for the video game “Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.” Grasping his winged statue, Yohalem had come a long way…
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May 27, 2011
100 Years In The Forward Charles Cohen, a resident of Manhattan’s Orchard Street, was found dead in his bed from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Cohen suffered from rheumatism and was practically paralyzed by the disease. Just three years earlier, he was newly married, healthy and working in an ice factory. But after he came down…
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The Zen of Kosher Scotch
As anyone who has visited the dry garden at the Zen temple Ryoanji, in Kyoto, Japan, can tell you, it’s not just the raw materials that make a site worth visiting. If raked gravel were all it took to attract tourists, then the world’s quarries would be mobbed. Likewise, the aura that surrounds Scottish whisky…
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Books Q&A: Novelist Haley Tanner on Love After Death
Haley Tanner’s debut novel, “Vaclav & Lena” (Dial Press), is about love without questions, hesitation or limits. This love flourishes between two Russian-Jewish immigrant children in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn: Vaclav dreams of becoming a magician, like Houdini, and casting the fragile Lena as his assistant. Tragedy temporarily unhinges this plan, and when…
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‘Bach’ to the Future With Wanda Landowska
When Virgil Thomson saw Wanda Landowska perform at New York’s Town Hall in 1942, he wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune, “She plays the harpsichord better than anybody else ever plays anything.” The same year, The New Yorker’s Robert Simon added: “When I’ve heard Mme. Landowska play harpsichord music, the same music has never seemed…
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