Category: Culture

When the NBA season tips off on Tuesday, there will be three Jewish players taking the court — the same trio who were in the league last year. Two of those players — Deni Avdija and Amari Bailey — have changed uniforms, while All-Star Domantas Sabonis is entering his fourth season with the Sacramento Kings. […]

The brightly colored “Sukkot boxes” offered up on Amazon boasted the colors of spring, not fall; had no ostensible use for the Jewish holiday; and contained a Hebrew misspelling that bordered on obscene. Reader, I bought them. And it wasn’t just me. Enabled by our Prime accounts, Jews across the United States shelled out about […]

Christopher Columbus was likely Jewish, Spanish researchers have announced in a splashy new documentary aired on Spain’s national broadcaster on Saturday. According to the documentary, the researchers spent 22 years researching Columbus’ national origins before concluding that bones buried in a Seville cathedral are in fact the famed explorer’s — and that his DNA suggests […]

In 2021, the Orthodox Union declined to put its kosher certification on Impossible Pork, even though similarly vegan “Impossible” foods — its burger, its chicken nuggets — carried the OU seal of approval.  “The Impossible Pork, we didn’t give an ‘OU’ to it, not because it wasn’t kosher per se,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the […]

If Daniel Schloff’s family had been on time to Yom Kippur morning services in 1965, he may have never encountered Sandy Koufax. Schloff, who was 17 years old at the time and a senior in high school, lived around 45 minutes away from Temple of Aaron synagogue in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Conservative congregation his […]

A second season of “Nobody Wants This” is coming, whether Jews want it or not. The Netflix series, about an interfaith relationship between a rabbi (Adam Brody) and a non-Jewish, agnostic podcaster (Kristen Bell), has proven a massive hit for the streaming platform, even as its depiction of American Jewish life — which includes an […]

As the NHL drops the puck on the 2024-2025 hockey season, Jewish fans will have plenty to root for. The season officially began last week with a pair of games in Prague between Jack and Luke Hughes’s New Jersey Devils and Devon Levi and Jason Zucker’s Buffalo Sabres. The main action begins Tuesday, and as […]

It was, I thought, a Jewish food writer’s dream assignment. Nearly four years ago, during the first autumn of the COVID pandemic, I sat down (virtually) with food superstar Ina Garten to learn about her childhood memories of home, family and food — and the impact those memories had on her career as a widely […]