What caught Nim Shapira’s eye when videos of New Yorkers tearing down posters of Israeli hostages began circulating in October 2023 wasn’t just the stark affront. It was also the poles the posters had been attached to. “I recognized every corner,” he said. “This was my neighborhood.” The filmmaker had never before turned his craft […]
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When Abe Kugielsky first began photographing the Hasidic Jewish community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in 2010, he was an outsider with a camera, met with resistance from a community unaccustomed to being documented. But by 2017, he had amassed a bank of roughly 50,000 photographs, and decided it was time to start posting his images […]
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On the second floor of a nondescript commercial building in Gravesend, Brooklyn, is a small artists’ studio. There, four long wooden tables are pushed together to create one massive table covered with oil paints, canvases, watercolors and other tools of the trade. The white walls are adorned with dozens of drawings and paintings; along one […]
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Jewish author Kyle Lukoff’s latest novel, “A World Worth Saving,” was named one of the finalists for this year’s National Book Awards in the Young People’s Literature category. The novel, which is aimed for middle-grade readers, features a young Jewish transgender boy who teams up with a golem, a creature from Jewish folklore, to save […]
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The chancellor of Austria is pressuring its public broadcaster and the city of Vienna not to host next year’s Eurovision Song Contest if Israel is excluded. The potential withdrawal from hosting the competition comes as several countries, including Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Iceland, have announced they will not participate in next year’s competition […]
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This year’s Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to a Hungarian writer whose work offers bleak visions of existence, and whose father hid his Jewish ancestry from him for much of his childhood. László Krasznahorkai, the 71-year-old novelist and screenwriter, achieved international acclaim for formally daring books like “Satantango” and “The Melancholy of Resistance,” as […]
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Two years after the Hamas attacks on Israel, the tragedy of Oct. 7 has become its own cinematic sub-genre. Filmmakers have rushed to bear witness, survivors have taken up cameras, and streaming platforms are now filled with documentaries and dramatizations that revisit, reimagine, and attempt to process the day’s horrors. From raw documentaries of the […]
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At first glance, the prayer book is one that’s found at countless Conservative synagogues across the country: Siddur Sim Shalom, which was published in 1985 by the Rabbinical Assembly. But the chewed-up appearance of the book’s left corner tells a different story: This siddur was grazed by a bullet during the Oct. 27, 2018 mass […]
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During his controversial set at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia, comedian Dave Chappelle joked that he would use the phrase “I stand with Israel” as a code to alert fans he was facing censorship. The state-sponsored show, which took place on Saturday and featured a host of top international comedians, was criticized by […]
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A school district in central Texas has removed “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” a classic young-adult novel dealing with the Holocaust, after reviewing books for material that could violate a new state law forbidding “DEI” classroom content. The novel was one of dozens to be removed after Leander Independent School District, in a suburb of Austin, undertook […]
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