Author: Jesse Orine

(New York Jewish Week) – Growing up in Brooklyn, Dylan Mars Greenberg went to Hebrew school and celebrated Shabbat and holidays with her family. But she never celebrated a bar or bat mitzvah — “it wasn’t something my dad really wanted me to do,” she said.  Instead, the 26-year-old filmmaker, musician, actor and writer began […]

((JR)) – The next director of New York’s Jewish Museum will be James Snyder, the former director of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem who is known as a prolific fundraiser for Jewish causes. Snyder, 71, will assume the role in September after serving for the past four years as the executive chairman of the Jerusalem […]

((JR)) — From “Schindler’s List” to “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” the non-Jewish, award-winning actor Ben Kingsley has starred in a number of Holocaust and other Jewish-themed movies. The recurring theme in his career wasn’t an accident, he said in a recent interview. Instead, he said, he picked the roles because his “vigorously antisemitic” grandmother […]

(New York Jewish Week) – If you’ve been on the internet the last few weeks, chances are you heard the summer’s biggest earworm “Planet of the Bass,” or seen the kitschy videos of a male and female performer dressed as 90s Europop stars dancing and lip syncing along to lyrics such as “All of the […]

((JR)) — Since the birth of hip-hop 50 years ago, plenty of Jewish rappers have picked up a microphone and rocked a crowd. They’ve spit rhymes in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, even Aramaic. Collectively, they’ve shattered stereotypes about what Jews look and sound like. But hip-hop is hypercompetitive, so the question must be asked: Who are […]

BOSTON ((JR)) — In 1725, Abraham de Oliveyra was officially registered as a silversmith in London — the first Jew known to be given a license to practice the trade in the city. Jews had been let back into England just 70 years beforehand following an expulsion centuries earlier, and Oliveyra’s registration established him as […]