Category: Culture

(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 […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Freddie Roman wasn’t just a Catskills comic but a curator and preservationist of a comedy tradition born at the Jewish resorts in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains.  For years he served as dean of the Friars Club, the New York city clubhouse of popular entertainment, where faded stars and up-and-comers gathered […]

(JTA) — Leonard Cohen’s momentous trip to the Sinai Desert to perform for Israeli soldiers in the wake of the Yom Kippur War is being turned into a dramatized TV series. “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai” will be written by Yehonatan Indursky, a co-creator of “Shtisel,” the landmark Israeli drama about an […]

(JTA) — Michelle Williams is one of the only non-Jewish actors with a starring role in “The Fabelmans,” director Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film based on his Jewish family. But it turns out that Williams, who plays the Spielberg character’s mother, has a Jewish family of her own. She told the Wall Street Journal that she […]

DETROIT, Michigan (JTA) — Predicting the outcome of a basketball game is tricky business, but one observer prior to the start of the Motor City Cruise’s latest home game made an easy call: “There’s going to be a lot of yarmulkes here.” As the stands at the 3,000-seat Wayne State University Fieldhouse filled up prior […]