Take it from this rabbi: You should binge-watch Netflix’s ‘Long Story Short’ for the High Holidays

This past Saturday night, during Selichot services, I led members of our congregation in our first recitation of “Ashamnu,” the confessional acrostic that we accompany by striking our hearts. There will be many recitations of the confessional to follow in the coming weeks. Yet it is the first — said late at night, and not, […]

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Met Opera adapts Michael Chabon’s Jewish novel ‘Kavalier & Clay’ for the stage

Jewish author Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” is part comic-book origin story, part immigrant saga and part love letter to New York City at its most scrappy and dazzling. Published in 2000, the novel follows the trajectory of Joe Kavalier, a Houdini-obsessed escape artist who flees Nazi-occupied Prague, […]

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Ohio auction house halts sale of paintings looted during the Holocaust and billed as ‘unclaimed property’

Two 17th-century paintings have been taken off the auction block after a Holocaust art restitution organization determined that they had been looted from a German Jew’s collection in France during World War II. The two paintings, believed to be by Dutch artist Ambrosius Bosschaert, were set to be sold at an auction house in Newark, […]

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At least 5 countries have said they will or could boycott Eurovision if Israel is included

The public broadcasters of both Ireland and the Netherlands announced this week that they will not participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest if Israel is allowed to participate. They join several other countries in pressing the competition’s organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, into excluding Israel as an act of protest against Israel’s participation because […]

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Sam Sussman’s novel is about his Jewish mom and the teasing possibility that Bob Dylan is his dad 

Sam Sussman’s debut novel, “Boy from the North Country,” revolves around a mystery: Was Bob Dylan, the singer and Nobel laureate, the narrator’s father?    Sussman could have written this tale as a memoir, an expansion perhaps of the 2021 essay he wrote for Harper’s Magazine: “The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son.” His […]

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