Category: Culture

(New York Jewish Week) — In 1955, a group of musicians gathered in a Manhattan recording studio and committed to tape 16 tunes. When the LP, “Tanz,” was released the following year, it barely made a splash. Over the years, however, the recording would gain a reputation as a landmark klezmer album, years before the klezmer […]

This article was sent as a newsletter. Sign up for our weekly Jewish sports newsletter here.  Happy Friday, Jewish Sport Report readers! And it’s a happy Friday indeed, because baseball season is upon us. Pitchers and catchers report to spring training next week, the games begin Feb. 24 and the 2023 World Baseball Classic is […]

(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. […]