(JTA) — Before becoming one of the most iconic vocal performers of her time, appearing in Broadway shows such as “Rent” and “Wicked” and voicing Queen Elsa in “Frozen,” Idina Menzel got her start singing as a teenager on the wedding and bar and bat mitzvah circuit near where she grew up on Long Island […]
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As director of Partnership2Gether of the Jewish Agency for Israel, it’s Pnina Agenyahu’s job to bring together disparate Jewish communities from around the world and celebrate their diversity. It’s a role for which Agenyahu has spent a lifetime preparing — ever since she made aliyah at the age of 3 on the back of her […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — Holocaust survivor and painter Frederick Terna, whom the New York Jewish Week honored as one of our “36 to Watch” this year, has died at 99. Terna was born in Vienna in 1923 and grew up in Prague. Starting in 1941, he was imprisoned in four Nazi concentration camps, including […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt was a guest on the popular New York radio show The Breakfast Club on Wednesday, discussing the recent rise in antisemitism and the need to repair Black and Jewish relations. “I believe you call people in before you call people out,” Greenblatt said, explaining to hosts Charlamagne […]
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(JTA) — An Israeli professor was asked by the host of a French TV news show why he publicly identifies his religion by wearing a kippah in a clip that went viral on Wednesday. “Many people are asking, why a professor wears a religious symbol in our studio,” the host of CNews pressed Dr. Cyrille […]
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LVIV, Ukraine (JTA) – Three rabbis sat around a breakfast table in this city’s Tsori Gilod Synagogue, discussing Russia’s war on the country where they work in a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. They named their hometowns as Lugansk, Lvov and Dnepr, the Russian names for Ukrainian cities that have vaulted into international headlines […]
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(JTA) — Many in the Libyan-Jewish diaspora know that even if they return to Libya some day, they would never again be able to visit the graves of their parents, grandparents or other loved ones who lived in the country while it was home to more than 30,000 Jews. A new initiative in one of […]
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(JTA) — Nearly 130 Finnish artists will not be working with Kiasma, the modern art wing of Finland’s national gallery, they announced, in protest of a Finnish-Israeli billionaire who supports the gallery and has connections to both countries’ arms industries. The artists had signed the statement by Monday after the museum refused to remove a […]
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Roya Hakakian is a poet, author, journalist and advocate for refugees. Every one of these roles is an offshoot of her own life experience as a child and teenager in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran and as an immigrant to the United States. Her poetry appears in many anthologies around the world, her books take a […]
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(JTA) — Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish president of Ukraine, was named Time’s “person of the year” on Wednesday for galvanizing “the world in a way we haven’t seen in decades,” in the words of the magazine’s editor-in-chief. “From his first 40-second Instagram post on Feb. 25 — showing that his Cabinet and civil society were […]
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