Category: Culture

((JR)) — Chicago Cubs first baseman Matt Mervis is selling T-shirts and hats emblazoned with his nickname spelled in Hebrew to raise money for the Israel Association of Baseball. “It’s a great cause to help grow the game in Israel,” Mervis told MLB.com on Thursday, “and try to build some fields over there.” Mervis, who […]

((JR)) — British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran came close to setting the attendance record at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on Sunday, drawing a crowd of 89,106 concertgoers. The current record-holder? A celebration of Talmud study in 2012 that filled the seats and stands with 93,000 people, most of them Orthodox men. That gathering, called the […]

((JR)) – Among the many books that conservative parents have recently asked their children’s schools to remove is a lushly illustrated version of the most famous Holocaust diary. The graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 2018, has found itself at the center of a growing number of controversies involving book removals […]

LONDON ((JR)) — London’s Jewish Museum is to close indefinitely next month and begin hunting for a new home for its collection of 40,000 objects, one of the largest of its kind in Europe. The rising costs of maintaining its current premises in northwest London and a difficult fundraising environment exacerbated an already precarious financial […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Some of the greatest talents in Jewish music have strolled Midwood’s lettered avenues, including the klezmer musician Pete Sokolow and the Hasidic composer Ben Zion Shenker. Both have left us — Sokolow in 2022, Shenker in 2016 — but the Modzitzer synagogue on Avenue L, where Shenker once lead prayers, is […]

((JR)) – Broadway made a statement about antisemitism Sunday evening, as two high-profile shows on the subject this season — the play “Leopoldstadt” and the musical revival “Parade” — pulled in multiple major Tony awards. Some of the shows’ honorees, in turn, made statements of their own linking hatred of Jews with other forms of […]

((JR)) — Eight times a week, audiences at Broadway’s “Parade” see the curtain rise on a retelling of an act of antisemitism. What they don’t see is the Jewish ritual that comes first. In an essay for The New York Times, 23-year-old star Micaela Diamond writes that before almost every performance, the cast members stand […]

(New York Jewish Week) —  Jews and comic books — two deeply entwined entities — will be the subject of a new pop culture convention coming to New York this fall. Billed as the “ultimate comics and pop culture event,” the first-ever Jewish Comics Experience, or “JewCE,” will take place at the Center for Jewish […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Subscribers of The New Yorker opened their mailboxes this week to a hard-to-miss hot pink cover with an illustration of a drag queen with a mohawk, large blue earrings and extravagant makeup.  They were looking at “The Look of Pride,” a self-portrait by a Brooklyn-based Jewish drag queen and artist […]

((JR)) — A filmed version of “Soul Doctor,” the 2013 Broadway musical about the life of the influential and controversial rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, will play in 600 movie theaters nationwide for one night only, on Tuesday. The performance was filmed at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem in 2018, as part of celebrations marking the 70th […]