Category: Culture

(New York Jewish Week) — For any New Yorker, the background noise of the 2000s may well have been marked by the numbers 800-888-8888, the ubiquitous jingle for the Buffalo-based personal injury law firm Cellino and Barnes.  The renown of Ross Cellino and Stephen Barnes grew even more when the pair contentiously split up in […]

(JTA) — In the hit show “The Sopranos,” veteran actor Jerry Adler plays mob-adjacent Jewish businessman Hesh Rabkin, who made a fortune in the music business decades earlier. In a first season episode, Hesh is confronted by a rapper seeking “reparations” for a late Black musician who he says Rabkin didn’t pay fairly for a […]

(New York Jewish Week) – After a successful off-Broadway run, Orthodox Jewish comedian Alex Edelman will bring his one-man show “Just For Us” to Broadway this summer.  The show had a sold out run in 2021 and 2022, starting at Cherry Lane Theater and then moving to the SoHo Playhouse and the Greenwich House Theater. […]

(JTA) — When she sits down to write song lyrics, Sabrina Teitelbaum, who records music under the moniker Blondshell, doesn’t plan to reference her Jewishness. It just spills out in subtle turns of phrase. In her song “Sepsis,” for instance, the quickly-rising 25-year-old rocker sings: “I think I believe in getting saved/Not by Jesus validation/In […]

(JTA) — While the United States swung its door shut to most refugees during World War II, a young American in France saved thousands, including some of the 20th century’s defining artists and thinkers — such as Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt — from the Nazis.  The rescue mission of Varian Fry, which went largely […]

(JTA) – A public high school in Florida has removed an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary from its library. It is the second known instance of this particular edition of the famous Holocaust book being swept up by conservatives seeking to purge schools of literature they deem inappropriate. The principal’s office of Vero Beach […]

(JTA) — What makes this year’s batch of new haggadahs different from all other years’? For one thing, there are entries written by machines — with not just one but two different versions written by artificial intelligence. The haggadah market is continually booming, as Jewish writers and creatives take inspiration from news, pop culture and […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Rabbi Steven Blane is nothing if not an innovator: Way back in 2010, a full decade before the pandemic made Zoom services a regular part of Jewish life, Blane launched an exclusively virtual synagogue, Sim Shalom. Among the many hats he’s worn throughout his professional life, Blane has also launched […]

(New York Jewish Week) — The idea of eating pastrami with matzah instead of rye bread may strike some as a sacrilege, but for members of the Jewish Auto Writers Society of America (JAWS), who will gather this week for a Passover seder at Katz’s Delicatessen, it’s become a tradition. “Frankly, bread is a filler,” said […]

(JTA) — Seymour Stein, one of the most influential music executives of the 20th century, who frequently throughout his career referred to his Jewish Brooklynite roots, died at 80 on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. The cause was an unspecified form of cancer, according to reports. Stein, born Seymour Steinbigle in 1942 and […]