Category: Culture

(New York Jewish Week) — A family of ashen, burned bodies sit around their kitchen table, their expressions frozen in terror — hands pressed against gaping mouths, silently screaming. An elderly couple, hands bound in rope behind their backs, embraces as blood pools around them and flames lick at their feet. A mother grips her son […]

(New York Jewish Week) – Amid Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Israeli and Palestinian boys act as symbols of a peaceful future in a new, larger-than-life mural painted this week on the side of a loft building in Bushwick. The Israeli boy, wearing a kippah and ritual fringes, and the Palestinian boy, who wears […]

((JR)) — Seven-time Grammy Award winner Alanis Morissette explores her family’s Jewish past, which she said was kept a secret from her for most of her life, on Tuesday night’s season premiere of the PBS celebrity genealogy series “Finding Your Roots.” “I think I found out that I was Jewish in my late 20s. I […]

((JR)) — When I spoke with novelist Elizabeth Graver in August about her novel “Kantika” — inspired by her own Turkish Jewish family — I asked her how she managed to breathe life into a tired genre like the Jewish family saga. “I want the characters to be flawed and complex, and for the turns […]

((JR)) – “The Zone of Interest” is not like other Holocaust movies. Directed by British Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, the film initially appears to follow an unexceptional German family in the 1940s and their idyllic lifestyle in a cute cottage near a river. A father (Christian Friedel), a mother (Sandra Hüller) and their five children […]

This article was produced as part of (JR)’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. ((JR)) — ChatGPT. Google AI. Microsoft Azure. Scribe. Dall-E2 – all different names for generative artificial intelligence software that is forcing educators to examine how technology affects students’ […]

(New York Jewish Week) — We’ve made it to the last week of 2023, and before we start the new year, we’re looking back on all the stories that you engaged with most over the past 12 months.  This year, Jewish New Yorkers showed us what meant the most to them — from getting excited […]

((JR)) – A year after a series of antisemitic tirades against the Jewish community, Kanye West, the rapper and fashion mogul who now goes by Ye, has posted what appears to be an apology, written entirely in Hebrew. “I sincerely apologize to the Jewish community for any unintended outburst caused by my words or actions,” […]

((JR)) — The Jewish tradition of Chinese food and a movie on Christmas is so thoroughly established that it has taken on an aura of ritual. And this year, several of the season’s biggest movies have Jewish themes or backstories of note. Here’s your Jewish guide to the new theatrical and streaming options available this […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Jewish people have made New York City home for centuries now, often finding opportunity and acceptance where it elsewhere had been denied. So when Jews began to tell their stories of their lives on film, it only makes sense that they would feature New York City front and center. From […]