Tag: culture

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 — 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 […]

A few years ago, two well-known Jewish women serendipitously met walking their dogs in Greenwich Village and immediately connected.  It was a meet-cute befitting a romantic comedy. But this was no movie, nor was it the beginning of a romance. Instead, this fortuitous encounter between bestselling author Delia Ephron and Emmy Award-winning actress Julianna Margulies […]

Exploring the mind-boggling array of greenery at the New York Botanical Garden is always a bit of a magical experience. That’s even more true during the holiday season, when the Bronx garden’s Holiday Train Show makes its annual appearance, bringing a host of model trains that run through a miniature New York City erected inside […]