It’s possible that you’ve never heard of theater producer Jeffrey Seller. But even someone with a passing knowledge of Broadway musicals will likely know the award-winning shows that he’s produced, including “Rent,” “Hamilton” and “Avenue Q.” Over his 40-year career, Seller, 60, who was raised in a Reform Jewish family in suburban Detroit, has earned […]
Continue Reading
Australian police have arrested one of the three men suspected in an arson attack on a haredi Orthodox synagogue in Melbourne last December that destroyed the building and injured one person. Giovanni Laulu, 21, of Melbourne, was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion that he had set fire to the Adass Israel Synagogue, an incident that […]
Continue Reading
Canada, too, will recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly in September as long as certain conditions are met, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Wednesday. “The deepening suffering of civilians leaves no room for delaying coordinated international action to support peace, security and the dignity of human life,” Carney, a liberal elected […]
Continue Reading
A Jewish group is outraged by Lithuania’s plans to convert a sports complex into a convention center at the site of a historic Jewish cemetery, reversing decades of advocacy to commemorate the memorial site. The Snipiskes Jewish Cemetery, currently buried beneath the Soviet-era Vilnius Sports Palace, has long been a source of contention between the […]
Continue Reading
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Tuesday that Britain will join France in recognizing a Palestinian state in September at the United Nations General Assembly if Israel does not agree to a ceasefire with Hamas. Starmer, who is facing increasing pressure from Britons over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war, cited the “catastrophic failure of […]
Continue Reading
Jon Stewart hosted writer Peter Beinart on “The Daily Show” Monday night, for a conversation in which the two Jewish liberals agreed that the war in Gaza was “horrific” and that Israel bore near exclusive blame for the suffering endured by Palestinians in the 22 months since the Oct. 7 attacks. While the two discussed […]
Continue Reading
Yiddish is the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe and all the places to which they spread. It is the language of socialists and capitalists, the Partisans who fought the Nazis and most of the millions who were killed in the Holocaust. It is the everyday tongue of tens of thousands of haredi Orthodox […]
Continue Reading
Jewish singer-songwriter Regina Spektor shot back at a pro-Palestinian protester who interrupted her concert Saturday night, telling the protester, “You’re just yelling at a Jew.” Later, she engaged in a back and forth with another audience member about the hunger crisis in Gaza, in a dramatic example of how deeply Israel’s war in Gaza is […]
Continue Reading
BERLIN – One of Germany’s most notorious postwar antisemitic agitators has died at 89. Horst Mahler, who founded the German left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction in 1970 and later championed neo-Nazis, died in a Berlin hospital on Sunday, according to his attorney, Jan Dollwetzel. Dollwetzel confirmed a statement from the far-right party Die Heimat, […]
Continue Reading
Tom Lehrer never identified closely with his ancestral Judaism. But the famed satirist and mathematician, who died Saturday at 97, wrote one of the first popular songs about the Jewish holiday. “(I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica” debuted in 1990, well after Lehrer’s peak as a performer, on a come-from-retirement performance on Garrison Keillor’s radio […]
Continue Reading
