Hours after emerging from a ritual bath marking her conversion to Judaism, Yona Speidel was leaving a celebratory dinner with her rabbi when a man across the street yelled “f–ck Jews.” For Speidel, it was an unexpected welcome into the Jewish community. “My rabbi looked at me and he goes, ‘Welcome,’” Speidel recalled. “And I […]
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What do the ultra-wealthy owe the rest of us? It may be the defining argument of our second Gilded Age. While Elon Musk insists that his businesses “are philanthropy,” and America’s richest people gave away on average less than 5% of their total wealth in 2025, an actual Gilded Age titan offers a different example. […]
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This article was produced by the events team at 70 Faces Media, the non-profit organization that publishes (JR) and the New York Jewish Week. It’s no secret: Mah jongg is having a major moment. The historic Chinese game — first popularized in the United States more than 100 years ago, then nurtured by Jewish women starting […]
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Just about the last thing I wanted to do on a summer weekend in the Berkshires was to see a play called “The Zionists.” The title alone practically dares audiences to arrive with their defenses up. Its subject is the bitter family and communal fractures that followed Oct. 7, 2023. Its Jewish characters argue angrily, […]
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During his run as the head of CBS Records, Clive Davis signed some of the biggest and most influential acts in rock-and-roll history, including Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. But it nearly all came crashing down in 1973, after Davis allegedly siphoned some money from his label to pay for his son’s bar […]
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I asked AI Sigmund Freud to interpret my dream this morning. All I got was some dancing dots, as if a) the great man had fallen asleep or b) my dream had broken his virtual brain. Freud is one of nine historical Jewish figures featured in “Ask Jewish Lives,” a new AI feature based on […]
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Jane Yolen was already an award-winning author and illustrator of more than 100 titles for young readers when her editor suggested she write a Jewish children’s book. At first, she resisted the idea. Sure, she was Jewish. But she didn’t grow up in a religiously observant family, and she insisted she didn’t know enough about […]
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Gwyneth Paltrow has drawn backlash after appearing in a new advertising campaign for 51 Park, a luxury residential development in the affluent Israeli coastal town of Herzliya. The commercial shows the 53-year-old Oscar-winning actress and lifestyle entrepreneur waking up in a New York luxury high-rise apartment and going for a run through the city. At […]
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When Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor was a young girl, her Jewish mother, during an argument, once called her the N-word. “She never used the word with me again,” Pryor, whose father is Black, recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of her mother, who belonged to the Jewish socialist group Workman’s Circle. “But she never apologized.” The […]
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British actor Helen Mirren criticized Israel at a film festival in Italy, in her first public comments since security footage of a November incident where she was accused by a stranger of being an “evil Zionist b—h” went viral late last month. “Evil forces are rising everywhere, even in a country like Israel,” Mirren said […]
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