Category: Culture

(JTA) — When people enter the world of “Hogwarts Legacy,” the blockbuster video game that was officially released on Friday, they will find themselves immersed in the fictional universe of “Harry Potter” — and face-to-face with an alleged antisemitic caricature.  The narrative of the game centers on a goblin rebellion in the 1890s, about a […]

(JTA) — Songwriter Burt Bacharach,  who with his longtime lyricist Hal David turned out a  string of hits in the 1960s and ’70s — including “Alfie” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” — died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94. Bacharach and David, both Jewish New Yorkers, also wrote […]

(New York Jewish Week) — A new book untangles one of the best known incidents involving Jews in the American Civil War — and suggests the real version is both more complicated and more interesting than the legend. In “Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army,” historian Adam D. Mendelsohn recalls the story […]

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with teens across the world to report on issues that impact their lives. (JTA) — During one of the recent rainstorms in Los Angeles, a security guard at Amanda Kronstadt’s Jewish high school reminded her to wear her rain jacket on […]

(JTA) — On a couple of occasions in Julian Schlossberg’s early life, he found himself in parts of the United States where some people he talked to had never met a Jewish person. The first was a stint in the Army, the second was while selling movies to rural television stations. But over the next […]

(JTA) — The Brooklyn Nets traded Kyrie Irving to the Dallas Mavericks, a team whose Jewish owner had spoken up about the star guard’s antisemitism controversy last year. Mark Cuban, known as one of the NBA’s most outspoken team owners and as a star of the hit TV show “Shark Tank,” did not comment on […]

This article was sent as a newsletter. Sign up for our weekly Jewish sports newsletter here.  Happy February, readers! This month brings us the Super Bowl, baseball’s Spring Training, and the NBA, NHL and NFL All-Star games. This weekend, you can catch Jack Hughes (New Jersey Devils) and Adam Fox (New York Rangers) in the NHL […]

(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama. A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. […]

(New York Jewish Week) –  “West Wing” star Joshua Malina will join the cast of Broadway’s “Leopoldstadt” starting March 14, replacing David Krumholtz in the central role of wealthy businessman and family patriarch Hermann Merz in the Holocaust drama. “I know the day that I was introduced to Tom Stoppard’s work: January 5th, 1984, when […]

(JTA) — Years ago, the Israeli filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem took a class led by director Eran Kolirin, best known as the maker of “The Band’s Visit.” This month, movies by both filmmakers are getting theatrical rollouts in the United States. On a recent Zoom call, Palestinian author Sayed Kashua joked: “Was that his class […]