Joshua Holzer, Westminster College
• Published July 25, 2022
In the late 1800s, the city of Białystok – which was once Polish, then Prussian, then Russian, and is today again part of Poland – was a hub of diversity, with large numbers of Poles, Germans, Russians and Yiddish-speaking Ashkanazi Jews. Each group...
By Leah Garrett, The Forward
• Published July 25, 2022
There’s a moment midway through “The Offer” when enraged film executive Robert Evans (Matthew Goode), a senior executive at Paramount Pictures, demands to know why Al Ruddy (Miles Teller), the producer of an as-yet-unknown movie called “The Godfather,”...
Madadh Richey, Brandeis University
• Published July 15, 2022
What is a “monster”? For most Americans, this word sparks images of haunted houses and horror movies: scary creations, neither human nor animal, and usually evil.
But it can be helpful to think about “monsters” beyond these knee-jerk images....
By Louis Keene, The Forward
• Published July 14, 2022
Almost every night for the past few months, a nondescript crew of yeshiva bochurs has fanned out across New York City, armed with nothing more than MetroCards and buckets to stand on.
The following morning, the familiar visage of Rabbi Menachem Mendel...
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (JTA) — When they flew out of this country for Israel three decades ago, Askabo Meshiha’s family left something valuable behind. Unlike many other Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel in 1991, they didn’t say goodbye...
Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content Officer
• Published June 23, 2022
Watching a game of mahjong can be harder to follow than a hockey game. Both move fast, but instead of following a puck and skaters, mahjong is a blur of hands and tiles. That’s probably why it's not a spectator sport -- until now, sort of. Because...
BY ROBERT A. COHN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF EMERITUS
• Published June 22, 2022
Every Holocaust survivor story is both a miracle and a curse. The miracle for any Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945 is the fact that they managed to escape the merciless, ruthless and efficient Germans at all. The curse is survivors’...
The St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum will reopen on Nov. 2.
The new 36,000 square foot structure will be four times larger than the previous facility, which was located on the lower level of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis building. It...
(JTA) — As an avid book collector who operates an independent Jewish press, Larry Yudelson was excited to learn that a new, annotated version of the Mishnah, the earliest compendium of Oral Torah, was on its way.
Then he found out how much it would...
By Mira Fox, The Forward
• Published June 10, 2022
When you think of numbers tattooed on wrists, you probably think of Auschwitz and Holocaust survivors with numbers inked on their forearms. But for some fans of “Stranger Things,” Netflix’s cult favorite horror show, they think of Hawkins, Indiana,...
One day in late October 1941, Pope Pius XII received chilling news. A bishop in Slovakia wrote to say that the country’s Jews “are simply being shot … systematically murdered, without distinction of sex or age.”
We can get a sense of how Pius...
