On the left side of the ground-floor gallery at the Upper East Side’s Grolier Club — an institution that bills itself as “America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles” — you’ll find elaborately decorated, centuries-old Jewish manuscripts from the likes of Italy, France and the Iberian Peninsula. On the right, there’s a similar assortment of […]
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At first glance, the prayer book is one that’s found at countless Conservative synagogues across the country: Siddur Sim Shalom, which was published in 1985 by the Rabbinical Assembly. But the chewed-up appearance of the book’s left corner tells a different story: This siddur was grazed by a bullet during the Oct. 27, 2018 mass […]
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“This country broke my penis, but it couldn’t break my spirit.” So says Jewish writer Gary Shteyngart in “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong,” a new documentary from The New Yorker about the botched circumcision Shteyngart received as a 7-year-old Russian immigrant to the United States. Told with humor, sensitivity and pain, the 20-minute film […]
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Fall is by far my favorite season in New York City — warm, sunshiny days followed by cooler nights; the excitement of back-to-school and the Jewish holidays and, perhaps best of all, Open House New York Weekend, an annual event that gives New Yorkers access to notable, little-known or usually inaccessible locations across the five […]
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“Being a fan of the Mets is like very, very much being Jewish — you know, you suffer,” Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman tells me. “Every now and then, you have wonderful, wonderful, great, great, great celebration — and then some more suffering.” Perlman, who turned 80 on Aug. 31, was describing his recent birthday celebration […]
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Jewish author Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” is part comic-book origin story, part immigrant saga and part love letter to New York City at its most scrappy and dazzling. Published in 2000, the novel follows the trajectory of Joe Kavalier, a Houdini-obsessed escape artist who flees Nazi-occupied Prague, […]
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When critically acclaimed stand-up comedian Gianmarco Soresi introduces himself to a new audience, he explains that his father is Italian, his mother is Jewish, and that he identifies as a “cultural Jew.” That, he says, “means I have all the gastrointestinal problems and stress and anxiety of regular Judaism — without the sweet comfort of […]
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In the fall of 1910, Edward Morgan, the Postmaster General of New York, made an impassioned plea to the city’s Jewish community: Send your High Holiday postcards early. It was the height of the postcard craze in the United States, and members of the city’s Jewish community were eager to send well wishes to their […]
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Sam Sussman’s debut novel, “Boy from the North Country,” revolves around a mystery: Was Bob Dylan, the singer and Nobel laureate, the narrator’s father? Sussman could have written this tale as a memoir, an expansion perhaps of the 2021 essay he wrote for Harper’s Magazine: “The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son.” His […]
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By the time the playwright Liba Vaynberg and I manage to steal a few minutes on Zoom, it’s already midday on a Friday, which means I’m running late from an appointment at a wig maker and frantically marinating a chicken for Shabbat dinner. I wouldn’t normally describe the circumstances of an interview in an article, […]
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