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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The last thing one might expect from Jeff Ross — the perennially raunchy, abrasive insult comedian known as a “one-man verbal assault unit” — is a poignant and hilarious Broadway show that, at times, feels like the most Jewish production on the Great White Way since “Fiddler on the Roof.” Ross is best known as […]
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Shavuot came early — or late, to be precise — this year for the lily pads at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden But on Thursday, the lily pads got their fill of the food mostly closely associated with the Jewish holiday. In fact, they were positively straining under the weight of cheesecakes from Junior’s, the Downtown […]
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Sasha Vasilyuk was surprised to be named a finalist for the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, wondering if the judges were going to honor an author whose “last name isn’t Jewish, and whose main character avoided being Jewish.” Nevertheless, her debut novel, “Your Presence Is Mandatory,” won the $100,000 prize for a story […]
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Zabar’s, New York’s iconic grocery and appetizing shop, sells everything from smoked fish, gourmet cheese and rugelach to pots, pans and high-end baking supplies. And now, the 91-year-old Upper West Side grocery — a staple among New York City Jews — is joining the sneaker game to celebrate the U.S. Open, the tennis tournament that […]
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When Liangda Hu first tried doing Daf Yomi, the practice of studying a page of Talmud per day, he struggled to read it. Hu found the language of English Talmud translations uniquely archaic and, as someone who speaks English as a second language, difficult to understand. So he turned to artificial intelligence. Now, Hu uses […]
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