Category: Culture

((JR)) — The world’s first Israeli-Palestinian boy band landed in Los Angeles to start recording songs on Oct. 6, the day before Hamas attacked Israel and kicked off a war in Gaza, a new feature from Billboard magazine reveals. As1one — pronounced “as one” — is a group of four Jewish Israelis and two Palestinians, […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Cartoonist and writer Roz Chast is best known for her work at The New Yorker, where she’s been a contributor since 1978. But the Brooklyn native is also famously associated with the city from which the prestigious publication takes its name.  Chast’s cartoons often explore the mundane hilarity of everyday […]

(New York Jewish Week) – “Humanity’s most true history is written only in blood. How Jews died, the entire world already knows.” So says Broadway star Steven Skybell at the beginning of “Amid Falling Walls,” a new musical from the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene. “But how Jews resisted against and fought the murderers, we know […]

((JR)) — It’s been 10 years since Thanksgivukkah — the rare convergence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah — revolutionized the Jewish-American holiday experience. It’s amazing that just one decade ago the biggest slogan in our community was “Light, Liberty and Latkes.” In these dark and difficult times, that phrase can call us back to a simpler, […]

((JR)) — A group of Jewish celebrities and TikTok creators decried antisemitism on the video social media platform in a private video call with its executives and employees on Wednesday.  The approximately 90-minute meeting included more than 30 participants, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times. It comes during a reported spike […]

((JR)) — Twenty of 25 finalists for the National Book Awards stood together on Wednesday night to deliver a call for a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, in a move that had caused one Jewish sponsor of the ceremony to back out. Zibby Owens, the owner of Zibby Books, announced on Tuesday […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Like many New York sports fans of his era, Jeffrey Gurock has a distinct memory related to legendary Jewish broadcaster Marty Glickman. When Gurock, 74, was growing up, one Sunday morning he and his family made the trek from the Bronx to visit his aunt and uncle in Yorktown Heights, about […]

This story was first published on My Jewish Learning. ((JR)) — This past week we entered the Hebrew month of Kislev, the month here in the Northern Hemisphere when we often experience the longest, darkest nights of the year. As the light contracts each day, I experience a tightening in my gut, an anxious fluttering […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Throughout his nearly 50 years living in Forest Hills, Queens, Gavriel Davidov was the unofficial mayor of the borough’s Bukharian Jewish community. He was widely known a peacekeeper, and the first person someone could turn to for help. The owner of Gavriel Davidov Jewelry, a fine jeweler in Manhattan’s Diamond […]

((JR)) — In his viral video on social media after the Hamas attack on Israel, comedian Daniel-Ryan Spaulding riffs on the imagined reactions of an intolerably “woke” activist. “If there was a Hamas terrorist attack at a queer rave in Brooklyn or Berlin, there’d probably be a purple-haired girl in the center of the massacre watching […]