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A Holocaust survivor shares her story as part of an avant-garde jazz performance at Joe’s Pub

January 30, 2025January 30, 2025Jesse Orine

Holocaust survivor Millie Baran has seen and done a lot in her 99 years. After being confined to the Oszmiana ghetto in Poland, she was deported as a teen to multiple labor and concentration camps. When the war was over, she spent four years in a displaced persons camp in Germany before moving to New […]

Famed Jewish expressionist Ben-Zion Weinman will be featured in a NYC exhibition for the first time in 25 years

January 28, 2025January 28, 2025Jesse Orine

For the first time in 25 years, the works of famed Jewish expressionist painter Ben-Zion Weinman will be shown in a solo exhibition in Brooklyn. Weinman, known simply by the mononym “Ben-Zion,” was a founding member of “The Ten,” a group founded in 1935 to draw attention to a group of Jewish American artists — […]

TikTokker Chris CaresNone wants Jewish people to stop ‘gatekeeping’ all the good food

January 23, 2025January 23, 2025Jesse Orine

Chris Campbell loves Jewish food. Known in some online circles as the “babka king,” he’s also quite fond of other Ashkenazi Jewish staples like rugelach, latkes and knishes. These foods, of course, are undoubtedly delicious. But what makes Campbell’s passion unique is that he isn’t Jewish — and he hadn’t even heard of most of these […]

The first-ever full-scale replica of Anne Frank’s secret annex opens in NYC

January 22, 2025January 22, 2025Jesse Orine

Photographs and postcards. A children’s calendar, filled with games, poems and stories. A partially darned sock, remnants of a project that was never finished. Such workaday items can be found inside just about any apartment in New York City. But the ones on display at the Center for Jewish History near Union Square are special […]

Where was God in the Holocaust? A NY poet and activist asks the question in a book of ‘psalms’

January 21, 2025January 22, 2025Jesse Orine

Of the 150 psalms in the book known in Hebrew as “Tehillim,” the 23rd may be the best known: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” The late rabbi Adin Steinsaltz explained that the verse compares the speaker to a lamb, and that God the shepherd “will lead him on a secure path […]

Jewish comedian Gary Gulman’s new one-man show will make you laugh — and probably cry

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025Jesse Orine

Jewish stand-up comedian Gary Gulman is trying a new approach in his new, one-man off-Broadway show, “Grandiloquent.” Between the usual moments of hilarity, Gulman, 54 — a “Last Comic Standing” finalist whose most recent comedy special, “Born on Third Base,” was released on Max in 2023 — takes a more serious, vulnerable approach to storytelling […]

In a new album, singer Ari Axelrod celebrates Jews’ contributions to Broadway

January 16, 2025January 16, 2025Jesse Orine

For six years, singer and actor Ari Axelrod has been performing a one-man musical show about Jews and Broadway in front of sold-out audiences around the country. It is a remarkable accomplishment, especially considering that Axelrod — who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home and has fostered a deep love of musicals since high […]

A lost film about Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side returns to the big screen in NYC

January 14, 2025January 17, 2025Jesse Orine

In the early 1920s, a Jewish filmmaker set out to create a movie that would counter the rising antisemitism of the time. The result was “Breaking Home Ties,” a silent film about Russian Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side that depicts Jews and Jewish practice in a sensitive light. “Breaking Home Ties” premiered at […]

Franz Kafka’s Hebrew writings are now on view in New York City

January 13, 2025January 13, 2025Jesse Orine

Celebrated Jewish writer Franz Kafka may have written his most famous works, including the novella “The Metamorphosis,” in German, his mother tongue. But Kafka was proficient in other languages, too, including Hebrew — a fact that some scholars point to when making the case that his Jewishness played a large role in his creative life. […]

A.J. Weberman, famous for picking through Bob Dylan’s trash, shares his thoughts on ‘A Complete Unknown’

January 9, 2025January 9, 2025Jesse Orine

A.J. Weberman — the writer and gadfly who gained notoriety in the 1970s by picking through Bob Dylan’s garbage — recently watched “A Complete Unknown,” the new biopic about the Jewish singer-songwriter. He didn’t like it. Even before the movie was over, Weberman, a lifelong Dylan obsessive who coined the term “Dylanology,” made his opinions […]