When Abby Chava Stein, 33, stepped away from her ultra-Orthodox upbringing, she wasn’t just leaving behind her way of life and her family — she was stepping into her authentic self. Now, the first openly transgender female rabbi from a Hasidic background takes center stage in “Becoming Eve,” a new play adapted from Stein’s 2019 […]
Continue Reading
Sheila Dardashti has spent her lifetime making music — but until recently had never written any of her own. Raised in Queens by Jewish lovers of folk music, Dardashti studied classical guitar in high school. As a young woman, she toured as half of an international folk music duo with her husband, Farid Dardashti, who had […]
Continue Reading
For much of the 20th century, the world of classical conducting was dominated by two figures: Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, who fiercely competed with each other throughout their prolific and illustrious careers. The first was Austrian, a stickler for exactitude who was, for a time, a member of the Nazi Party. The second […]
Continue Reading
In 1941, a group of intellectual Jews confined to the Vilna ghetto — writers, scholars, poets and the like — were forced by the Nazis to plunder their own people’s treasured works for a Nazi propaganda museum, the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. These intellectuals, including the poet Abraham Sutzkever and the writer […]
Continue Reading
A medieval manuscript, believed to be the oldest Jewish book in the world, is now on view in New York City. The Afghan Liturgical Quire, which dates to approximately the year 700 CE, is on display at the Jewish Theological Seminary Library in Morningside Heights as part of an exhibit, “Sacred Words: Revealing the Earliest […]
Continue Reading
His name is Max Cohen, but to his 200,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, the 24-year-old content creator is better known as Murray Hill Boy. Cohen is making a name for himself on social media by humorously sending up Jewish scenes and stereotypes, making funny videos about how Jewish moms place their bagel orders, what […]
Continue Reading
There’s an ignoble tradition of falsified memoirs. “The Hitler Diaries,” a forgery published in 1983, fooled even a Hitler expert. “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” published in 1997, was sold as a survivor’s testimony but turned out to be a hoax (the part where the author was raised by wolves might have been […]
Continue Reading
It’s nearly Purim — this year, the holiday begins on the evening of Thursday, March 13 — and there’s no shortage of family-friendly ways to spend this joyful Jewish holiday, including costume parties, art exhibits, carnivals and playful tellings of the Purim story. But if you’re looking for something a little bit different, you could bring the […]
Continue Reading
Today is Fat Tuesday — also known as Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday — which marks the end of Carnival and the beginning of Lent, a solemn period observed by many Christians during the 40 days leading up to Easter. If you’re not in New Orleans — where Mardi Gras marks the end of weeks of […]
Continue Reading
An endless Passover seder takes center stage in “One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe,” by writer Dara Horn and illustrator Theo Ellsworth, award-winners who teamed up for a humor-filled, time-travel graphic novel for young people. The tale of an epic seder — it drags on for six months — joins a new crop of children’s […]
Continue Reading
