Comedian Gibran Saleem had never met a Jewish person until starting his graduate studies at New York University more than a decade ago. The child of Pakistani immigrants, Saleem was raised in a Muslim household in northern Virginia where, he said, he was mostly surrounded by people with a similar cultural background. “I knew about […]
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You had to have been born in the 1980s or earlier to have a firsthand memory of the night Yitzhak Rabin was shot 30 years ago this week. For most young adults, Rabin’s assassination is something they learned about in history class, at a day school assembly or from their parents. That gap — between […]
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More than 80 years after she parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of the only military operation in World War II that attempted to rescue Jews, the Jewish poet and kibbutznik Hannah Senesh is having her moment. The play “Hannah Senesh” is running through Nov. 9 at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York — […]
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Following a yearlong, $14.5 million renovation, the Jewish Museum — which is housed a 1908 French Gothic mansion on Fifth Avenue — is opening two upgraded floors to the public. Among the new features on the museum’s reimagined third and fourth floors: a new installation, “Identity, Culture and Community: Stories from the Collections of the […]
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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. As a high school senior, the stress of college applications, homework and the looming end of childhood leaves me constantly waiting for […]
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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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