Culture

What We’re Not Naming Our Kids

The Amazing Grace of Leonard Nimoy

I often called him Leib, his Yiddish name, picking up on the term of endearment used by his wife, Susan. We were friends for more than 25 years, the trailing spouses of the even longer friendship between our wives. I was not a Trekkie (or Trekker, to use the term Leonard preferred). I didn’t watch…

Of Rosanne Barr, King David Kalakaua and 9 Other Things About Jewish Hawaii

1) Seven thousand two hundred and eighty Jews live in Hawaii. 2) One of the earliest documented appearances of a Jew in the Hawaiian islands occurred in 1798, when a sailor named Ebenezer Townsend, Jr. recorded that the Hawaiian king came aboard a whaling ship with a cook belonging to the Mosaic faith. 3) Jewish…

Cancer-Stricken Israeli Playwright Finds Comedy in Disease

Producer Daniel Krupnik and his wife, translator Hilla Bar, first encountered “Happy Ending”in April 2014, when they saw a photograph in an Israeli newspaper accompanying an article about Anat Gov’s musical play. The picture depicted a woman dancing hand-in-hand with a man dressed as a crab. Not long afterwards, they decided to translate and adapt…

Irving Kahn, Oldest Money Manager, Dies at 109

Irving Kahn, the American Jewish money manager who died on Thursday, February 26, at age the age of 109, was more than just the oldest living investment professional, as he was often dubbed. Kahn exemplified a work ethic which stressed ever-fresh intellectual interests as a way to remain young in spirit. Always on the lookout…

The Occupations and Preoccupations of Arkadi Zaides

In the video clip, a Jewish boy of no more than 12, seemingly drunk on Purim wine and missing a shoe, kicks and slaps the exterior of a Palestinian home in Hebron. A man in a kippah, perhaps the boy’s father, appears and drags the boy away. The man turns to a soldier off camera…

An Unlikely Ghost Story From David Cronenberg

In “Maps to the Stars,” the latest creep-show from Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, Benjie Weiss, a 13-year-old child actor, starts seeing dead people. First it’s Cammy, a girl with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma whom he met in a hospital on a “Make a Wish”-type visit, and who shows up outside of his bedroom wearing a spectral bridal…

All The Yiddish That’s Fit To Print in Easthampton, Massachusetts

Who knew that we loved to listen to the air? Until the death of analogue music we never realized we craved the warmth of vinyl’s atmospheric cracklings, but in 2014 record sales spiked 49%. And so it is with printing. Once we no longer rely for our news on swathes of newsprint hurtling through factories…