Skip to Main Content
A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

Jewish Pop Culture

We now know when 'Fauda,' season 4 will begin

We now know when ‘Fauda,’ season 4 will begin

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished December 1, 2022

Good news for “Fauda” fans. The critically acclaimed TV show that has swept the world has announced that the new season will be released in the United States on Jan. 20 on Netflix. The show has already aired in Israel this past summer. The Netflix...

Amazon will not pull antisemitic movie promoted by Kyrie Irving, says Jewish CEO

Andrew Lapin, JTAPublished December 1, 2022

(JTA) – Bucking weeks of public pressure from Jewish groups, celebrities and the Brooklyn Nets, Amazon will not stop selling an antisemitic documentary on its service that was promoted by NBA star Kyrie Irving. The company’s CEO Andy Jassy, who...

The true story of the modern latke – a shocking timeline

Gabe Friedman, JTAPublished December 1, 2022

The latke is one of those Jewish foods that feels steeped in tradition as if it’s been made the same way since the days of the Maccabees. But in a revelatory article, Atlantic senior editor Yoni Appelbaum explained that the latke as we know it —...

New album celebrates all the Christmas songs written by Jews

New album celebrates all the Christmas songs written by Jews

By Lior Zaltzman, KvellerPublished December 1, 2022

Did you know that a great deal of Christmas songs were actually written by Jews? That’s right, the songs that keep playing in stores and doctor’s offices for months leading on to Christmas were written by Jews — from “Santa Baby” to “Rudolph...

The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here

The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here

Published December 1, 2022

(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior. “I found him in the warehouse...

Rabbi Eliyahu Chitrik, 21, takes in one of the opening-week matches at the World Cup in Qatar. He spends most of his time at the games providing kosher food to Jewish visitors.

Kosher food, Shabbat arrive at World Cup in Qatar

By Bruria Efune, Chabad.org/newsPublished November 30, 2022

More than 400 freshly baked challahs were enjoyed by Jewish fans and officials at the World Cup in Qatar this past Shabbat. Baked in a kitchen specially koshered by a young Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi from Turkey, it’s part of a month-long effort to...

Julia Haart with her daughters Batsheva, left, and Miriam, right. Courtesy of Netflix

 ‘My Unorthodox Life’ is back

By Irene Katz Connelly, The ForwardPublished November 30, 2022

Everyone knows the girlboss era is over.  For almost a decade, the term denoted admiration for a woman who, through grit and determination, achieves the kind of powerful career historically reserved for men. But millennials have become disillusioned...

Photos: The amazing purse collection of Abbie White

Photos: The amazing purse collection of Abbie White

Bill Motchan, Special to the Jewish LightPublished November 30, 2022

Abbie White loved collecting purses. She had some 500 of them, many antique rarities. White, who died in 2016, was a longtime resident of Covenant Place. Besides collecting purses, White participated in many Covenant Place activities. She was a member...

Partial layout of the graves discovered during the excavation at the medieval Jewish cemetery of Erfurt.
Thuringian State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology/Karin Sczech + Katharina Bielefeld

Ancient DNA from the teeth of 14th-century Ashkenazi Jews in Germany already included genetic variations common in modern Jews

Shai Carmi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and David Reich, Harvard UniversityPublished November 30, 2022

About two-thirds of Jews today – or about 10 million people – are Ashkenazi, referring to a recent origin from Eastern and Central Europe. They reside mostly in the United States and Israel. Ashkenazi Jews carry a particularly high burden of disease-causing...

A German town built a granary atop its Jewish cemetery. Now the bones are yielding insights about Ashkenazi DNA.

Toby Axelrod, JTAPublished November 30, 2022

BERLIN (JTA) – The city of Erfurt in central Germany is home to an impeccably restored medieval synagogue made possible because local Jews had been expelled long before the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Jewish sites. Now, Erfurt’s long-hidden...

Comedian Freddie Roman, who brought the Borscht Belt to Broadway, dies at 85

Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTAPublished November 29, 2022

(New York Jewish Week) — Freddie Roman wasn’t just a Catskills comic but a curator and preservationist of a comedy tradition born at the Jewish resorts in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains.  For years he served as dean of the Friars Club,...

Deeply Jewish comedy is having a moment, even as antisemitism rocks pop culture

Jackie Hajdenberg, JTAPublished November 29, 2022

(JTA) — Two weeks after a Trump-supporting heckler threw a beer can at Ariel Elias at a club in New Jersey over her politics, the Jewish comedian’s fortunes took a turn for the better. A video of the incident went viral and she made her network television...

Load More Stories