Author: Jesse Orine

(JTA) – A Holocaust-themed novel by bestselling author Jodi Picoult was among dozens of books removed from a South Florida school district library’s circulation last month, in the latest example of books with Jewish themes getting swept up amid a larger conservative-led effort to police potentially inappropriate material in classrooms. “The Storyteller” was removed from […]

(JTA) – With seven nominations for his most personal film ever, this could have been Steven Spielberg’s biggest year at the Academy Awards. But the hot-dog fingers had other plans. “The Fabelmans,” the director’s highly personal dramatization of his Jewish upbringing, didn’t win a single one of the Oscars it was nominated for Sunday night. […]

(JTA) — Last July, Abby Meyers helped lead Team USA to a gold medal in women’s basketball at the Maccabiah Games, or the “Jewish Olympics,” in Israel. Starting next week, she hopes to embark on a run towards another championship: a Division I NCAA tournament title. Meyers, a graduate transfer at the University of Maryland, […]

(JTA) — Throughout his career, actor Adam Goldberg has been associated with iconic Jewish roles, from the hero in the kitschy 2003 action comedy “The Hebrew Hammer” to a Jewish soldier in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar winner “Saving Private Ryan.” But for his latest role, on CBS crime procedural “The Equalizer,” Goldberg didn’t know his character […]

(JTA) — Chaim Topol won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of an immigrant to Israel, stepped off the stage in London to fight for his country and had his sketches of Israeli presidents turned into postage stamps. But the actor was, by far, best known for his embodiment of Tevye the Dairyman in “Fiddler […]

(JTA) — Ben Savage, the Jewish actor best known for the 1990s coming of age series “Boy Meets World,” is running to replace Adam Schiff, the Jewish Democratic congressman from California who is running for Senate. Savage, 42, is among at least four Democrats running in the primary to replace Schiff in his Los Angeles-area […]

(New York Jewish Week) — YIVO has launched an eight-year project to digitize its Jewish Labor and Political Archives, widening access to some 3.5 million pages related to Jewish revolutionary, socialist and labor movements in Europe and America. The project, the largest archival digitization project in the history of the Jewish research institute, will shine […]

(New York Jewish Week) — When Jewish literary power couple Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss divorced in 2014 — amid rumors that he was in love with his longtime friend Natalie Portman — it captivated the nation. Well, maybe not the nation, but certainly the literary and media worlds, as well as the hipster […]