Category: Culture

(JTA) — British filmmaker Oliver Park isn’t Jewish, but he does have a deep appreciation for the Jewish roots of the horror genre that informed his work on “The Offering,” his feature debut as director about an ancient demon set in a Hasidic enclave in Brooklyn. “Jewish horror stories have been around for thousands of […]

(JTA) – Franz Kafka was a devotee of Yiddish theater, fell in love with his Hebrew teacher and once encountered the owner of a brothel he frequented in synagogue on Yom Kippur. The broad strokes of Kafka’s biography have long been known to historians, but a new English translation of the Czech author’s complete and […]

(JTA) — Turner Classic Movies admits that capturing the “Jewish experience” in a series of films is a daunting task, but the network is attempting to do so anyway. Every Thursday night in January, the channel is showing movies spanning from the 1930s through the 1990s on the theme. According to an article on the […]

(JTA) — Steven Spielberg said he was the sixth-happiest person in the world after he won best director at this year’s Golden Globes awards for “The Fabelmans,” his autobiographical film about his Jewish family. “I think … there’s five people happier than I am,” he said in his acceptance speech, which he said he had […]

(New York Jewish Week) — When a fire devastated the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village two years ago, East End Temple, a nearby Reform synagogue, welcomed church-goers to worship in their sanctuary. Since then, a relationship has blossomed between the synagogue and the church, which has remained homeless due to the six-alarm fire that […]

(New York Jewish Week) — A revival of “Parade,” a musical about the 1915 lynching of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank, will arrive on Broadway this spring, following a successful seven-performance run last November.  Ben Platt, the Jewish Tony-award winning actor who originated the title role in the Broadway hit “Dear Evan Hansen,” will star […]

(New York Jewish Week) — In 2017, Deborah Veach went back to Germany, looking for the site of the displaced persons camp where she and her parents had been housed after World War II. They were in suspension, between the lives her parents led in Belarus before they were shattered by the Nazis, and the […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Regular listeners of Conan O’Brien’s podcast generally expect to hear the comedian interview A-listers such as Michelle Obama and “Fleishman Is in Trouble” star Lizzy Caplan. But the former late-night host interviews “regular” people, too, and sandwiched between two recent episodes — featuring “The Office” star Ed Helms and “You” […]

(JTA) — In 1923 in New York, a Yiddish play that featured the first lesbian scene on a Broadway stage was censored for being indecent. In 2023 in Florida, a play about the first play has been canceled for the same reason. For many involved in the new play, including its Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish playwright and […]

(JTA) – Were Jews the “OG slaves”? Can American slavery be compared to the Holocaust? And who gets the last word on Louis Farrakhan? These questions have spurred very serious debates over time — and now will be getting a raunchier take in the new Netflix comedy “You People” that hits streaming Jan. 27.  Starring […]