Category: Culture

(JTA) — Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish president of Ukraine, was named Time’s “person of the year” on Wednesday for galvanizing “the world in a way we haven’t seen in decades,” in the words of the magazine’s editor-in-chief. “From his first 40-second Instagram post on Feb. 25 — showing that his Cabinet and civil society were […]

(New York Jewish Week) — A selfish social media influencer, an all-knowing, benevolent ghost known as “Harry the Hanukkah Fairy” and “Tiny Tim” Cratchet, the good-natured ill child from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” may seem like they all come from different worlds, but each appears as a character in “A Hanukkah Carol, or GELT […]

(JTA) — Natan Levy, one of the few Israelis ever to compete in the mixed martial arts Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, isn’t pulling any punches in talking about Kanye West’s antisemitism. “Kanye West, if you’ve got a problem with me or my people, come see me, bro,” Levy said during an interview Saturday following […]

(JTA) — Israel’s government has lashed out at Netflix over a new Jordanian movie that they say disparages the country’s military and their actions in the War of 1948 that led to Israel’s independence. “Farha,” Jordan’s entry into the Academy Awards’ best international feature race, is a historical drama about the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” the […]

(New York Jewish Week) — There’s a reliably funny Twitter account called @JewWhoHasItAll, which imagines a universe where nearly everyone is Jewish and those who aren’t are the outliers.  That’s the sensation I got on a visit to the Museum of Broadway, which opened last month. A three-story tribute to the Theater District located in its […]

(New York Jewish Week) — On a Wednesday evening last month, three generations of a Jewish family made their way to their seats at the Longacre Theater to see “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s epic Broadway play about the tragedies that befall an extended Jewish family in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna. The […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Auschwitz survivor Stella Levi chose not to tell the story of what she endured during the Holocaust until she was well into her 90s and met the author Michael Frank. “I didn’t want my identity to be fixed in that way. I didn’t want that number to be tattooed on […]

(JTA) — Robert Crumb put the “x” in comix by setting to paper his basest sexual longings, including strong-legged Jewish women who were cowgirls and who went by the name Honeybunch Kaminski. So when an actual strong-legged Jewish cowgirl named Aline Kominsky walked into his life, it was love at first sight, and never wavered. […]

(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior. “I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says. […]

(JTA) — Two weeks after a Trump-supporting heckler threw a beer can at Ariel Elias at a club in New Jersey over her politics, the Jewish comedian’s fortunes took a turn for the better. A video of the incident went viral and she made her network television debut on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. She […]