Actor Gal Gadot has won the Genesis Prize, sometimes called the “Jewish Nobel,” for supporting Israel even as backlash against the country’s actions in Gaza rocked Hollywood. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Gadot has been an outspoken advocate for Israelis taken captive by Hamas. Calling herself “a proud Jew and a proud Israeli,” she said in […]
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ROSWELL, New Mexico — If it weren’t for an Ashkenazi Jew named Stanton T. Friedman, the world might have long ago forgotten what’s come to be known simply as the “Roswell incident.” Instead, countless books, documentaries and made-for-TV dramas have explored the 1947 discovery of mysterious materials found on a New Mexico ranch that Friedman […]
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Comedian Gibran Saleem had never met a Jewish person until starting his graduate studies at New York University more than a decade ago. The child of Pakistani immigrants, Saleem was raised in a Muslim household in northern Virginia where, he said, he was mostly surrounded by people with a similar cultural background. “I knew about […]
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After years of virulent antisemitic comments, the American rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, told an Orthodox rabbi on Tuesday in New York that he was ready to “make amends” for his actions. “I feel really blessed to be able to sit here with you today and just take accountability,” Ye told Rabbi Yoshiyahu […]
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Season 2 of Netflix’s “Nobody Wants This” has sparked plenty of debate — much of it centering on how the show depicts Jewish women. Critics have rightly called out the stereotypes: the no-nonsense, overbearing mother, the controlling wife, the self-absorbed sister-in-law. These portrayals can feel dated and, at times, unfair. When Jewish characters appear so […]
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Israeli film director Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s latest film, “The Sea,” is about a young Palestinian boy from the West Bank who is denied a permit to visit Tel Aviv with his classmates. Longing to see the Mediterranean, he courts danger as he sets out to make the journey on his own. The Arabic-language drama was […]
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Jamie Field was still a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in New York City when she watched the first season of “Squid Game: The Challenge” and saw a call to action flash across the screen: “Could this be you? Apply now.” It was 2023, and Field, who had long gravitated toward other reality television […]
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More than 80 years after she parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of the only military operation in World War II that attempted to rescue Jews, the Jewish poet and kibbutznik Hannah Senesh is having her moment. The play “Hannah Senesh” is running through Nov. 9 at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York — […]
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Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, says it has reached a major milestone in its efforts to uncover the identities of all of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, crossing the 5-million name threshold with the help of AI. That leaves 1 million names still unknown from the tally of 6 million murdered Jews that is […]
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Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin need no introduction. Since their son, Hersh, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, taken hostage in Gaza and, later, murdered by his captors, the American-Israeli couple have become, for many, the personification of an entire nation’s pain. They didn’t want this. They […]
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