Category: Culture

(JTA via J. The Jewish News of Northern California) — When the Sacramento Kings face the Golden State Warriors in the first round of the NBA playoffs starting this weekend, they will be led by their Lithuanian-American — and soon-to-be-Jewish — center, Domantas Sabonis. The 26-year-old All-Star is in the process of converting to Judaism, […]

(New York Jewish Week) — The martini kit arrives in a bright pink box. Nestled among strings of hot pink confetti are two martini glasses and a shaker, two olives, toothpicks, two single-serving bottles of gin and vermouth, pastrami oil and pastrami spices. What’s that? Pastrami? Martini? Together? Yes, you read it right. The “Maisel […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Mafia movies will have you believe that wise guys aren’t born, they’re made. But that wasn’t the case for Myron Sugerman, a second-generation Jewish gangster who is the subject of the new documentary, “Last Man Standing: The Chronicles of Myron Sugerman.” Sugerman — who made his mark (and his money) by […]

(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 […]