Category: Culture

(JTA) — Just a few years into her comedy career, Lisa Geduldig was invited to perform standup at the Peking Garden Club near Northampton, Massachusetts. She went to the gig assuming it was a comedy club. It wasn’t. “I just had the most ironic experience,” Geduldig remembers telling a Jewish summer camp friend on the […]

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) — When youth group leader Evan Shrier first started organizing events for his peers at Temple Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills, California, he was excited to […]

(New York Jewish Week) — In my decades as a journalist, I’ve interviewed some pretty powerful, important and, yes, even famous people. But never before have I been so excited — starstruck, even — to meet a subject, and this one wasn’t even human.  I was positively giddy to visit the Upper East Side home last week of […]

(JTA) — When the New York Giants and Washington Commanders face off on “Sunday Night Football” this weekend, there will be two extra lights inside the stadium. Sunday is the first night of Hanukkah, and for the first time ever, the National Football League’s marquee game will feature a menorah lighting. Organized by Chabad’s teen […]

(New York Jewish Week) — Hanukkah 2022 is just days away — the eight-day holiday begins Sunday, Dec. 18 and concludes the evening of Sunday, Dec. 25.  If you’re looking to celebrate the Festival of Lights beyond the annual family Hanukkah party, you’re in luck: In this great and very Jewish city of ours, there […]

(JTA) — The eight crazy nights of Hanukkah came early for Adam Sandler when the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced Tuesday that the comedian and actor would be honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at a ceremony in March. The prize is presented annually to individuals “who have had an […]

(JTA) — It was early November when Nicholas Wymer-Santiago walked into his local Target in Austin, Texas, and realized it was beginning to feel a lot like Hanukkah. Instead of an endcap with a limited array of Hanukkah basics, as he had seen in past years, there stretched out a whole aisle of holiday products: pillows; […]

(New York Jewish Week) – In the heart of Manhattan, you can page through the Passover story in an Italian haggadah from half a millennium ago, check out the posters for the most popular Yiddish plays of the 1920s and examine dried flower arrangements from the Holy Land made at the end of the 19th […]

(JTA) — Given his place in the international literary canon, it’s hard to believe that there has never been a widely-released documentary made about the Jewish Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow. That’s about to change, as PBS debuts “American Masters: The Adventures of Saul Bellow” on Monday night. The documentary, which was filmed by Israeli […]

For an American Jewish comedian, Tehran Von Ghasri has an interesting story to tell, as his name suggests. The son of an Iranian-Jewish immigrant father and an African-American mother, Tehran’s heritage includes a mix of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Zoroastrian, and any part of that mix is fair game for Von Ghasri’s standup. Yet despite […]