Category: Culture

(New York Jewish Week) — Ella Joy Meir, the Brooklyn-based musician who leads the alt-pop group Iris Lune, did not expect to spend the first five months of the pandemic sequestered in her father’s home in Israel. She and her wife, journalist Mikhal Weiner, and their 1-year-old son had gone to visit family in Israel for […]

(JTA) — Two years ago, a poll on Twitter tried to settle once and for all how to refer to the corner of the social media platform where Jews conversed. “Jwitter” got two thirds of the 525 votes, with the rest falling to “Jtwitter.” Whatever they call it, the Jewish users of Twitter have used the […]

This piece contains spoilers. (JTA) – At the fancy private school where he has just started his first day, Jewish sixth-grader Paul Graff (Banks Repata) is asked by a major donor what his last name means. Sheepishly, he admits that it was shortened from the longer family name — one that ends in “-stein.” The […]

(New York Jewish Week) — A New York revival of the 1998 Broadway musical “Parade” — about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man, Leo Frank, at the hands of a Southern mob — arrives at an auspicious, if not ominous, time. Antisemitism is again part of the national conversation, while nationalism and accusations of […]

(JTA) — Gad Elmaleh has been one of the most famous Jews in France’s entertainment industry over the past two decades. The son of Moroccan immigrants, who has often referenced his Jewish identity in his wildly-successful sketches, has been nominated for a Cesar award, the French equivalent of an Oscar, and he has crossed over […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Many Holocaust documentaries follow a familiar arc, from normalcy, to the unthinkable, to destruction. The last reel often includes scenes of corpses and skeletal survivors, usually in the company of the American and Russian soldiers who liberated them. The films might end with clips from the Nuremberg Trials, or vignettes […]

(New York Jewish Week) — After a smash-hit run interrupted by COVID, “Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish” is returning next week for a seven-week run at Manhattan’s New World Stages. For many in the cast, Jewish or not, returning to “Fiddler” feels emotional —  especially in a time of world upheaval, rising antisemitism and […]

(JTA) — The around 120,000 Jews who live in Brazil make up less than 1% of the country’s total population, of approximately 214 million people. But today, according to Marcio Bellora Saraceni, a 29-year old lawyer from Rio de Janeiro, “all of Brazil knows” the name Nissim Ourfali — a bar mitzvah boy who became […]

(JTA) – Years before his recent public antisemitic tirades that sank his reputation and cost him billions in endorsement deals, the rapper Kanye West had paid a settlement to a former employee over his use of antisemitic language, NBC News reported. In the previously unreported 2018 settlement, the anonymous former employee alleged that West, who […]

(New York Jewish Week) — UJA-Federation of New York contributed more than $17.5 million to a new cultural campus in Jerusalem that opened Thursday. The $50 million, 2.5-acre Jerusalem Campus for the Arts combines schools for theater, film, television and Middle Eastern classical music, plus performance spaces. UJA announced its support for the project in […]