Category: Culture

(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 […]

ELKO NEW MARKET, Minn. ((JR) via TC Jewfolk) — Thomas Poretsky is six years away from being behind the wheel of a street-legal car and is too young to drive bumper cars at the State Fair. This is ironic as he stands in the shadow of Elko Speedway in a firesuit and holds his racing […]

((JR)) — The most prominent American Jewish history museum is extending a free admission program that began when it reopened following the pandemic.  The elimination of ticket fees through at least the end of 2023 reflects a vote of confidence in Philadelphia’s  Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, which was fighting to survive three […]

(New York Jewish Week) — In the industrial Port Morris neighborhood in the Bronx, a 10-block stretch of Walnut Avenue bears the name Rose Feiss Boulevard, honoring the Jewish immigrant woman who lived, worked and touched the lives of many in the borough. Rose Feiss was born in Minsk, Russia in 1901. She immigrated to […]