November 27, 2021
By RON KAMPEAS
(JTA) — Stephen Sondheim, the Jewish lyricist and composer who redefined the American musical through a monumental canon of influential and innovative theatrical works, has died at 91. He died suddenly Friday after enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner with friends at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, The New York Times reported.
Sondheim’s stunning debut came writing the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s score for “West Side Story” in 1957,...
November 26, 2021
By CNAAN LIPHSHIZ
JERUSALEM (JTA) — In a supermarket here, Ohad David makes a beeline for the most expensive olive oil in the store.
He takes three bottles of the award-winning Midnight Coratina brand, which goes for about $3 per ounce. It has “medium potency, green fruitiness and a green-leaf, grassy bouquet,” according to its description on the website of Ptora, the boutique olive oil factory that makes it.
But David,...
November 25, 2021
By ALAN SMASON, Exclusive to the CCJN
While most of us will celebrate this Thanksgiving Day with our respective family and friends enjoying festive repasts, watching football games, and sharing good times, there will also be much to consider about this uniquely American holiday. There are many myths that are associated with this holiday that have been steeped in our earliest schooling.
The story tells of the upright, proud Pilgrims...
November 24, 2021
By ANDREW LAPIN
HUNTINGTON WOODS, Michigan (JTA) — For nearly six months, anyone driving through this well-manicured and heavily Jewish residential Detroit suburb was guaranteed to spot the yard signs. They were red, white and blue, with a large black-and-white illustration of a bearded young man sporting a beanie and a faint smile.
“FREE FENSTER,” the signs proclaimed in large text. There were other slogans, as well: “Protect The Press.”...
November 19, 2021
By ASAF SHALEV and ELLA ROCKART
(JTA) — A massive survey conducted over the past year found that even as young Americans are rejecting traditional organized religion, they are still embracing faith and spirituality, broadly defined.
The pollsters behind the Springtide Research Institute, a new nonprofit dedicated to research about the “inner and outer lives” of young people, say their poll, of more than 10,000 Americans between 13 and 25, is...
November 19, 2021
By RON KAMPEAS
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (JTA) — Days before a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of protesters here at the site of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, he texted his mother.
Samantha Bloom was worried that her son would run into trouble in Charlottesville, where he was headed in his gray 2010 Dodge Charger to join a rally billed as a response to the proposed removal of...
November 15, 2021
By JACOB GURVIS
(JTA) — A crochet museum in Joshua Tree, California features countless crochet animals that appear in airport ads worldwide. The National Mustard Museum in Wisconsin was founded by a Jewish condiment aficionado.
In February 2019, another niche museum opened around 90 miles east of the mustard mecca: the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, located in Milwaukee.
Co-founded by Phil Sklar, a Jewish Illinois native, and...
November 12, 2021
By ALAN SMASON, Exclusive to the CCJN
Danny Fenster, a Jewish Detroit-born journalist who won a top Louisiana award for a series of stories he wrote in New Iberia about the marginalized and threatened African-American community there, was formally sentenced today to an 11-year prison term by military authorities in Mynamar.
Fenster, who had been detained in prison by authorities since May 24, was boarding a flight at Yangon (formerly...
November 11, 2021
By BEN SALES
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — One of the first images of “The Shrink Next Door,” the limited series premiering Friday on Apple TV+, is of a smiling man wearing a huge kippah, chatting at a party in the Hamptons.
The party, viewers will later find out, is being held at the summer home of Marty Markowitz, a garment district merchant whose life becomes increasingly dominated...
November 09, 2021
By CNAAN LIPHSHIZ
(JTA) — The Austrian government inaugurated a $7 million Holocaust memorial monument on the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms.
The “Shoah Wall of Names” that city and central government officials unveiled Tuesday in Vienna lists 64,440 Holocaust victims on 160 granite slabs, and is the result of years of lobbying by commemoration activists for a major monument that reflects both the scope of the Holocaust and...
