Thursday, April 02nd 2020
By ALAN SMASON
Ellis Marsalis, Jr., a pioneer in jazz music, a renowned educator and the patriarch of the undisputed first family of New Orleans jazz, has died from pneumonia brought on by infection of COVID-19. He was 85.
Marsalis, who was a native of New Orleans, grew up as the son of a an African-American businessman who had come to the city in 1927 and eventually became a social activist and noted hotelier. Ellis, Jr., born in 1934, was a college graduate from Dillard University in 1955, who studied classical music there.
His love of music education kept him...
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By ALAN SMASON
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced at his 2:30 p.m. press conference today, March 31, that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases caused by coronavirus pandemic reached 5,237 with 239 deaths. That represents 1,212 new confirmed cases reported, the highest jump in any one 24-hour period...
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Emphasizing the heightened danger to the elderly from coronavirus infection, Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennett urged Jews around the world not to welcome grandparents to their homes for Passover seder.
Bennett’s stern decree was promoted in a video greeting released today, Monday, March 30. Despite the tradition of gathering all...
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(JTA) — Adam Schlesinger, known as one of the lead songwriters of the pop rock band Fountains of Wayne and the musical series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” died Wednesday morning at 52 from coronavirus complications, Variety reported.
Schlesinger, who grew up in...
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WASHINGTON (JTA) — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is working out at the high court’s private gym, with precautions, during the pandemic, her trainer said.
“Everybody’s been shut down,” Bryant Johnson told Law 360, a legal news website, this...
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By RON KAMPEAS
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Rabbi Barry Freundel, a once-prominent Modern Orthodox rabbi in Washington, D.C., who was convicted for secretly videotaping women in his synagogue’s mikvah, is scheduled to be released early from prison.
First, however, an assistant...
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Workers under the direction of Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, Rabbi of the Western Wall and holy sites, removed notes Tuesday morning, March 31, from between stones in the Western Wall. Oftentimes thousands of people from Israel and around the world will...
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(JNS.org) –If you were to take a wider perspective on this current pandemic, you would immediately realize that the earth is like one giant petri dish facing a universal contagion, where we are all in this together. In this dish,...
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