Category: Culture

(New York Jewish Week) — During World War II, three young women formed a small legion of the Dutch underground resistance, fighting Nazis with the most powerful weapons at their disposal: their youth, their gender and their sexuality.  They were sisters Freddie and Truus Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft, who, in  1940 were 14, 16 and […]

((JR)) — New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft participated in a panel conversation on fighting antisemitism and racism on Sunday during the annual NAACP convention in Boston. Titled “Hate Has No Home: Racism, Anti-Semitism and Building Bridges to Fight All Hate,” the conversation was moderated by Fox Sports host Joy Taylor and featured NAACP President […]

((JR)) — The social media company owned by Elon Musk has once again reinstated Kanye West, the musician and artist whose antisemitic spree last fall twice cost him his account. Accounts that have tracked West’s presence on X, the platform known until last week as Twitter, first noted his reinstatement, disappearance and then reinstatement again […]

(New York Jewish Week) — “I need two matzah ball soups!” a deli clerk yells into the microphone during the lunch rush at 2nd Ave Deli — which, since 2006, is no longer located on Second Avenue but on East 33rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. While the original deli building is now a […]

((JR)) – Over the course of Irish pop singer Sinead O’Connor’s career, she made her fair share of enemies — most notably the Catholic Church, after she ripped up a picture of the pope on “Saturday Night Live.”  But five years after that incident, she also found herself in the crosshairs of Israel’s future national […]

((JR)) — What did rabbis of late antiquity know about Christianity? To find out, an Israeli religion scholar turned to an Israeli zoologist who studies bats. Their strange-bedfellows paper on the topic uses network analysis — a mathematical field used to visualize data — to map the connections of the rabbis of the Talmud with […]

((JR)) — According to the Jewish Virtual Library, 550,000 Jews served in the United States armed forces during World War II. There were 38,338 Jewish casualties, while 26,000 Jewish soldiers “received citations for valor and merit.” But in high-profile TV and film, identifiably Jewish soldiers have been a rare sight. One exception came 25 years ago […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Award-winning Jewish actress, comedian and writer Rachel Bloom, star and co-creator of the CW hit “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” will bring a one-woman musical comedy to an off-Broadway theater this fall for a four-week run. “Death, Let Me Do My Show,” written by and starring Bloom, will begin previews at the Lucille […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Imagine an Upper West Side seder like any other: adults praying, haggadahs dappled with brisket juice, matzah ball soup a little too salty. Only that’s not a Manischewitz bottle on the table. That’s a magnum of Cru Beaujolais. For this type of epicurean refinement, it helps to have someone in […]

(New York Jewish Week) – A woman dressed as Fanny Brice from “Funny Girl” and another dressed as Fruma Sarah from “Fiddler on the Roof” were among the 100-plus people who filed into a Midtown conference room on Friday morning to discuss Jewish identity on Broadway.   The Jewish fans — whose real names were […]