DETROIT, Michigan (JTA) — Predicting the outcome of a basketball game is tricky business, but one observer prior to the start of the Motor City Cruise’s latest home game made an easy call: “There’s going to be a lot of yarmulkes here.” As the stands at the 3,000-seat Wayne State University Fieldhouse filled up prior […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — In May of 1937, 7-year-old Inge Eisinger lived in a luxurious Vienna apartment with a pantry stocked with favorite foods and a staff to keep her company. Though she had a strained relationship with her mother and an absent father, Inge, who was mostly raised by her maternal grandmother Anna, […]
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BUCHAREST (JTA) — When Michael Shafir moved to Israel from his native Romania as a teenager in the 1960s, it wasn’t because the Jewish teen was burning with Zionist fervor. Instead, it was the first country that agreed to take him. “I would have left for wherever there was no communism, because I could no […]
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(JTA) – Indy’s going to sock it to the Third Reich once more. The fifth movie in the Indiana Jones series will plop Harrison Ford’s heroic archaeologist into “a castle swarming with Nazis” in the year 1944, according to new plot details revealed in Empire Magazine this week. Digital de-aging technology will be used to […]
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(JTA) — Qatar may have caused an uproar by banning alcohol at the World Cup soccer tournament in Doha this month, but for religious Jewish fans, some kosher offerings will be available, thanks to two rabbis. Rabbi Marc Schneier, from New York, and Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s emissary to Istanbul, worked with […]
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(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month. It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished […]
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LONDON (JTA) — David Baddiel, a comedian-turned-activist against antisemitism who calls himself “one of the U.K.’s very few famous Jews,” was holding court in the basement of one of Britain’s best-known TV studios. As a reporter headed hurriedly for the exit, Baddiel slouched into his chair, seemingly exhausted by the interview he had just completed […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — “You never know how people are going to respond,” says Jewish comedian Ari Shaffir, referring to his new standup special, “Jew,” which has more than 3 million views (and counting) on YouTube. The self-released, 90-minute showcase of stories and jokes goes deep into his life story, including his studies at […]
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(New York Jewish Week) — Despite being named for a Jewish bill of divorce, ‘The Gett” is a new off-Broadway play that began as a marriage between a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn and a West Village theater company that specializes in “diverse, challenging and provocative” works. At Park Slope’s Congregation Beth Elohim, Associate Rabbi Matt […]
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(JTA) — When the New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor was reporting the 2017 Harvey Weinstein sexual assault story that earned her a Pulitzer prize, the powerful Hollywood producer and his team tried to influence her by using something they had in common: They are both Jewish. “Weinstein put [Jewishness] on the table and seemed […]
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