KYIV, Ukraine (JTA) — Yuliia Krainiakova fled her home in Kharkiv, Ukraine, after Russian troops invaded last year and made her way to Berlin, where she and her daughters settled for 10 months with the help of Jewish organizations. After returning to Kharkiv several months ago, she hoped to experience some of the Jewish gatherings […]
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(JTA) — What makes this year’s batch of new haggadahs different from all other years’? For one thing, there are entries written by machines — with not just one but two different versions written by artificial intelligence. The haggadah market is continually booming, as Jewish writers and creatives take inspiration from news, pop culture and […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — Rabbi Steven Blane is nothing if not an innovator: Way back in 2010, a full decade before the pandemic made Zoom services a regular part of Jewish life, Blane launched an exclusively virtual synagogue, Sim Shalom. Among the many hats he’s worn throughout his professional life, Blane has also launched […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — The idea of eating pastrami with matzah instead of rye bread may strike some as a sacrilege, but for members of the Jewish Auto Writers Society of America (JAWS), who will gather this week for a Passover seder at Katz’s Delicatessen, it’s become a tradition. “Frankly, bread is a filler,” said […]
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(JTA) — Seymour Stein, one of the most influential music executives of the 20th century, who frequently throughout his career referred to his Jewish Brooklynite roots, died at 80 on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. The cause was an unspecified form of cancer, according to reports. Stein, born Seymour Steinbigle in 1942 and […]
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(JTA) — After Russian President Vladimir Putin reunited with his Jewish high school teacher on an official visit to Israel in 2005, he bought the elderly widow an apartment in Tel Aviv. That’s according to a widely circulated story based on an interview that the former teacher, Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, gave to an Israeli news outlet in 2014. At […]
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(JTA) — A former principal at an Australian school for Orthodox girls has been convicted on 18 counts of abusing students, including a charge of rape, in a case that strained relations between Australia and Israel. The conviction came more than two years after Malka Leifer was extradited from Israel, where she had fled in […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — Jeremiah Lockwood, the singer, composer and frontman of The Sway Machinery, is preparing for an upcoming concert by “doing a lot of talking to ghosts.” These “ghosts” are those of the Jewish women singers and cantors of the past century. As it happens, many women — not just men — […]
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CHICAGO (JTA) — All writers strive for a good story. How far they will go to find it depends on their ambition, their wherewithal and their sanity. Isaac Babel, a Russian-Jewish writer who came from a relatively stable, privileged background in Odessa in the late 1800s, would go to war among Cossacks who murdered Jews, make […]
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LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Colt Cabana, real name Scott Colton, is used to walking out to crowds of hundreds of fans as a member of All Elite Wrestling, a popular show that airs on channels such as TBS and TNT. On Sunday, he’ll be wrestling at a synagogue. Temple Beth Am, located in Los Angeles’ […]
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