culture -

From ‘Hairspray’ to ‘South Park,’ composer Marc Shaiman tells a showbiz story shaped by Jewish humor

February 9, 2026February 9, 2026Jesse Orine

Marc Shaiman likes to joke that for half a century he’s been “the funny Jewish guy at the piano,” a role as old as vaudeville and as enduring as a well-timed joke. But behind the punchline is a career that traces a distinctly Jewish path through American show business: a bar mitzvah where he improvised […]

Bill Aron, photographer of Jewish countercultures, gets his due in a sweeping retrospective

February 9, 2026February 9, 2026Jesse Orine

I was late to the havurah movement — the egalitarian, counterculture congregations that blended grassroots spirituality, social activism and skepticism about mainstream synagogues and the Jewish establishment. By the time we joined Farbrengen in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s, the founders of the movement were sprouting gray hairs and more than a few were […]

A new exhibit honors writer Lore Segal, a child survivor and lifelong skeptic of easy truths

January 26, 2026January 26, 2026Jesse Orine

I’ve never read a Holocaust chronicle quite like Lore Segal’s autobiographical 1964 novel, “Other People’s Houses.” Mordant, unsentimental and sometimes painfully honest, it’s the story of an Austrian girl sent to England on the Kindertransport, as well as a portrait of the artist as a young refugee. More than one of her legions of admirers […]

Stories of ghosts, grief and Shabbat gladness win top prizes in Jewish children’s literature

January 26, 2026January 27, 2026Jesse Orine

Anna is a misunderstood sixth-grade girl who communicates with the ghosts of her Jewish ancestors. Teased by her classmates and worried-over by her family, she finds comfort and understanding with her Bubbe and her beloved Jewish traditions. “Neshama,” Marcella Pixley’s lyrically written novel-in-verse, won the gold medal for Jewish children’s literature for middle-grade readers from […]

As Habonim Dror camps open space for anti-Zionist views, some families push back

January 26, 2026January 27, 2026Sara Wood

This article was produced as part of (JEWISH REVIEW)’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. In the summer of 2025, Habonim Dror North America, a progressive Labor Zionist youth movement, implemented a new principle, or pillar, welcoming non–Zionist and anti-Zionist perspectives […]

Judd Apatow grew up idolizing Mel Brooks. Now he’s telling Brooks’ story in an HBO documentary.

January 21, 2026January 21, 2026Jesse Orine

When Judd Apatow was growing up on Long Island, there was no debate about who ruled the comedy world. “Nobody was funnier than Mel Brooks,” Apatow once wrote. “Mel Brooks was the king.” Decades later, after himself becoming a prolific Jewish filmmaker and comedy impresario, Apatow has turned that childhood certainty into a sweeping tribute. […]

This Jewish artist fought Nazis with a paintbrush, when art like his still mattered

January 8, 2026January 8, 2026Jesse Orine

I remember being freaked out, and fascinated, by my parents’ copy of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. It featured these especially lurid illustrations; I can still see a little girl in a red coat, trapped in a spider’s web and tormented by lizards, bats and a huge black spider with a skull and crossbones on […]

An Israeli couple is reshaping ideas about Jewish culture at a historically Black university

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026Sara Wood

The class does not begin with a lecture. Instead, Neta Elkayam stands at the front of the room and sings. Usually in the Moroccan Arabic of her ancestors, rather than her native Hebrew. The students — most of them Black, most of them American, many of them encountering Jewish culture for the first time — […]

Irving Berlin’s 1926 interfaith marriage sparked a Jewish debate that, 100 years later, hasn’t gone away

January 2, 2026January 2, 2026Jesse Orine

Exactly 100 years ago, on Jan. 4, 1926, legendary American Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin married Ellin Mackay, a Roman Catholic heiress, in a civil ceremony in Manhattan’s City Hall. What some considered a misalliance of prominent figures from different worlds was the subject of much comment, as much for their class differences as their religious […]

At Illinois Holocaust Museum, teens learn the Shoah’s Jewish history — and how to apply its lessons to today

January 1, 2026January 1, 2026Jesse Orine

This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives. On a freezing December day in Chicago, an elderly woman sat in a chair in a small downtown auditorium, speaking in measured […]