Category: Culture

(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 […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Jeremiah Lockwood, the singer, composer and frontman of The Sway Machinery, is preparing for an upcoming concert by “doing a lot of talking to ghosts.” These “ghosts” are those of the Jewish women singers and cantors of the past century. As it happens, many women — not just men — […]

CHICAGO (JTA) — All writers strive for a good story. How far they will go to find it depends on their ambition, their wherewithal and their sanity. Isaac Babel, a Russian-Jewish writer who came from a relatively stable, privileged background in Odessa in the late 1800s, would go to war among Cossacks who murdered Jews, make […]

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Colt Cabana, real name Scott Colton, is used to walking out to crowds of hundreds of fans as a member of All Elite Wrestling, a popular show that airs on channels such as TBS and TNT. On Sunday, he’ll be wrestling at a synagogue. Temple Beth Am, located in Los Angeles’ […]