For Brooklyn-based Jewish musician Rafael Cohen, life has been a series of journeys: across continents, across musical genres and across the spiritual divide. The 48-year-old was born and raised in Mexico City before moving to Washington, D.C. with his parents at age 10. There, he played in a series of local punk bands before moving […]
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Pierre Goldman was a figure of legend in 1970s France — a firebrand leftist intellectual, a criminal, a child of the Holocaust, and a man accused of murders that remain shrouded in mystery to this day. “The Goldman Case,” a French courtroom drama that homes in on Goldman’s 1976 retrial for murder, has thrust him […]
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For most of Jewish culinary history, anyone seeking to make matzah balls faced one major choice: sinkers or floaters? In the 20th century, with the advent of home-cooking conveniences, another decision joined the one about density: from scratch or from a box? Now, in an era of niche food products, home cooks have a new […]
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Following violence against Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam last week, France has thrown heavy policing muscle behind a soccer match with Israel on Thursday. The UEFA Nations League game between France and Israel at the Stade de France stadium in Paris is being guarded by 4,000 officers and 1,600 stadium staff, according to Paris police […]
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At the Orchard Estate assisted living facility in Woodbury, New York, residents hum along to the klezmer music familiar to many Jews of their generation. The Yiddish-inflected music with roots in Eastern Europe is old school, but the band is not: Its six members range in age from 10 to 16. The young musicians are […]
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A collection of documents described as a treasure trove of Jewish music has been acquired by the New York Public Library, after being hidden in a cantor’s basement in Yonkers for 40 years. Sheet music, manuscripts and orchestral arrangements for close to 4,000 musical works — including cantorial music, Hasidic melodies, Yiddish theater, klezmer and […]
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(JR) — Late on Thursday night, Esther Voet heard explosions from her home in the center of Amsterdam. Voet, who is the editor in chief of a Dutch Jewish weekly newspaper, quickly learned that she was hearing heavy fireworks — set off in anger, not celebration. Panicked messages began pouring into her phone from a […]
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Cantor Jennifer Bern-Vogel was used to hearing her mother tell the story. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1938, her mother, then Marianne Katzenstein, who was 16 at the time, was in her family’s synagogue in Bielefeld, Germany, practicing the organ. She finished up, used a key to lock the building and returned home. Later […]
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What’s the common link between a kibbutznik from Israel’s embattled north; the granddaughter of Israel’s first woman Olympian; and quite possibly the only student ever to transfer from Harvard to California Baptist University? They’re all hitting the hardwoods this season as Jewish players on U.S. college basketball teams. The NCAA season tipped off on Monday, […]
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This is a developing story. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had dispatched two planes to Amsterdam to rescue Israeli soccer fans beset by mobs after a game between Ajax, a local team, and Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli team. Videos that circulated on WhatsApp and were shared by the Israeli embassy in the […]
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