MONTREAL (JTA) — Vandals defaced Quebec province’s oldest synagogue building with Nazi swastikas over the weekend, prompting a Canadian Jewish watchdog to call on Montreal mayor Valérie Plante to do more to fight antisemitism. Leaders of the Bagg Street Synagogue — located just off of Saint Laurent Boulevard in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, at the former […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — When Anat Gov’s play “HaChaverot Hachi Tovot” (“Best Friends”) premiered in 1999, it was an anomaly among Israeli works of theater. In fact, Gov wrote it with anomalous intentions: In an interview before it opened, she called the piece a form of “compensation for the fact that there are no […]
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(JTA) — A Jewish member of Finland’s parliament said that he was assaulted in a Helsinki subway station on Saturday, where an assailant punched him in the face and hurled antisemitic insults. Ben Berl Zyskowicz, a member of the conservative-leaning National Coalition Party, said that in addition to the antisemitic comments, the assailant blamed him […]
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(JTA) — “It’s like a Jewish ‘Lord of the Rings,’ but he’s just going to his mom’s house.” That’s how director Ari Aster, known for his acclaimed horror movies “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” described his new film, “Beau Is Afraid,” in a behind-the-scenes video released on Wednesday. Aster, who works with A24, the same studio behind […]
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(JTA) — For Michal Stamova, the challenge of translating Passover’s core text into Ukrainian started with the title. The haggadah — the book containing the Passover story — starts with an “h” sound in both Hebrew, its original language, and English. In Russian, the primary language of organized Jewish life in Ukraine until recently, there is no […]
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(JTA) — Greek authorities arrested two men on Tuesday who were planning mass terrorist attacks on Jewish sites in Athens, including a Chabad outpost and a Jewish restaurant, according to reports. The Mossad, Israel’s spy agency which contributed to the investigation, told the Associated Press that the men, who are Pakistani nationals, are also part […]
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This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. TORONTO (JTA) — At a time of declining synagogue affiliation rates and following a pandemic slump, one of North America’s largest Conservative congregations gained 900 new members […]
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(JTA) — HarperCollins has revised multiple novels by the famed British mystery writer Agatha Christie to remove references to Jews and other minorities deemed offensive by sensitivity readers. The edits, which the British Telegraph first reported on Sunday, add Christie to a growing list of authors whose work is getting tweaked for contemporary audiences. Roald […]
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(JTA) — Ben Stiller offered his own High Holiday alternative to Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” as his fellow Jewish comedian accepted the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. During an awards ceremony that took place on March 19 and aired last night on CNN, Stiller asked from the stage at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing […]
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(JTA) — The last 20 years haven’t been kind to Jewish journalism, with local weeklies shrinking or folding and even big city papers suspending their print publications and going completely digital. Publishing online has allowed these papers to cut costs and given them the potential for a wide reach — albeit a potential undermined by […]
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