For nearly three years, much of Jewish culture has been shaped by war, rising antisemitism and questions of identity under pressure. Rachel Israel’s latest movies head in a different direction. In the space of a year, the New York filmmaker directed two unabashedly Jewish comedies — “The Floaters,” set at a Jewish summer camp, and […]
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LONDON – Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Britain’s right-wing Reform UK party, is under investigation by Parliament’s standards watchdog over whether he should have prefaced his remarks in a House of Commons debate on pro-Israel influence by noting that he had visited the country as a guest of a pro-Israel group. The Parliamentary Commissioner […]
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Before the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it would honor fashion designer John Galliano with a major Costume Institute exhibition next spring, the museum convened at least two unusual meetings: a face-to-face with Galliano and a number of prominent rabbis, and a larger meeting with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, museum officials and several prominent […]
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I knew that the folk singer Arlo Guthrie’s mom was Jewish in the same way that I knew that jazz great Louis Armstrong spoke some Yiddish. “Guess who’s Jewish (even a little)” is the Jewish national pastime. But I couldn’t have guessed how deeply Arlo’s father, the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, was enmeshed in […]
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Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel. The […]
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An unpublished novel has paved the way for the birth of a new Jewish fiction imprint, in the leading edge of a flurry of initiatives to combat antisemitism in the publishing industry by taking hold of the means of production. Meg Keene had an enthusiastic agent with a long track record of sales when she […]
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The British pop icon Boy George has gone to bat for Israel and its supporters multiple times in recent months, rejecting boycott calls and expressing solidarity after antisemitic violence. Now, he has released a single in the same key. “We Will Dance Again” defends Israel’s military response in Gaza, criticizes musicians and activists who have […]
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Most people spend their later years looking back. Harold Grinspoon has spent his reinventing himself. The businessman became a philanthropist. The philanthropist discovered Jewish children’s books and created PJ Library. In his late 80s, he became a sculptor after a cherry tree fell in his yard. Now, as he turns 97, Grinspoon is reflecting on […]
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“To be a liberal Zionist, it’s quite a lonely place,” said Amir Tibon, the Israeli journalist whose memoir “The Gates of Gaza” is one of the defining books of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. “Lonely” is relative, of course. Tibon’s story of how he, his wife Miri and their young daughters hunkered […]
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Behind the imposing stone walls of Eastern State Penitentiary — the Philadelphia prison that once held Al Capone — sits a small, unlikely sanctuary: a synagogue built by inmates, for inmates, nearly a century ago. Now, a new exhibition is telling its story. Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood, was an active prison from […]
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