LAS VEGAS (JTA) — The Republican Jewish Coalition conference was about 2022, and also 2024. It was about how a near Republican sweep in state and local races last week revealed a way back to GOP control of the federal government. It was about moving more Jews from D to R. What the conference this…
(JTA) — On the wall of Susie Essman’s powder room hangs a giant portrait of herself. Actually, the portrait is of Susie Green, Essman’s beloved, foul-mouthed character on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” HBO’s long-running improvisational sitcom exploring the social rules that govern all of our lives, and especially those of the one percent. It comes from…
(JTA) — A theater in London apologized for the “unconscious bias” that led a playwright to give a billionaire character a Jewish-sounding name in a play set to open this week. The Royal Court Theatre issued the apology Saturday over the name Hershel Fink, which was applied to the character of a high-tech executive in the…
(JTA) — A New Jersey truck driver who defeated the former New Jersey State Senate president in an upset apologized Friday for social media posts in which he compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust and called Islam a “cult of hate.” Edward Durr, who unexpectedly won the State Senate seat representing New Jersey’s 3rd legislative district…
(JTA) — Aaron Feuerstein, who became known as the “Mensch of Malden Mills” for continuing to pay his workers even after the textile factory he owned burned to the ground, died at 95 on Thursday. The devout Orthodox businessman died at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, after being injured in a fall several days earlier,…
LAS VEGAS (JTA) — Nikki Haley, among the most popular likely 2024 presidential contenders in the pro-Israel community, sharply criticized AIPAC for what she said was its overemphasis on bipartisanship in its outreach to Democrats. Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations under former President Donald Trump, told a Republican Jewish Coalition conference here that…
(JTA) — (New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Padma Lakshmi’s “Taste the Nation,” the acclaimed food docuseries, returned to Hulu this week — with schmaltz and pickles. In a special, four-part holiday edition, Lakshmi highlights traditional holiday foods from locations around the U.S. — she visits Los Angeles to celebrate the Korean New Year,…
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — On Sunday, for the 36th time, Peter Berkowsky will wake up at 3:00 a.m., drive in the dark from his home in Livingston, New Jersey to Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island and set up a pre-race minyan, or Jewish prayer quorum, at the starting grounds for the New…
(JTA) — In what was seen as a crucial test in Israel’s longstanding governing crisis, the country’s lawmakers managed to approve a national budget for the first time in more than three years on Thursday. A failure to do so by a Nov. 14 deadline would have meant the collapse of Israel’s new government and…
(JTA) — The Republican Jewish Coalition’s 2020 conference was one of the last Jewish conferences to be canceled as the pandemic set in: The group had gone so far as to order branded hand sanitizer. Now, it’s one of the first to resume, and it’s doing so amid a great deal of change relevant to…
(JTA) — The prestigious Booker Prize for fiction has gone to a South African’s novel about a Jewish woman’s dying wish. Author Damon Galgut picked up the £50,000 ($68,000) prize at a ceremony on Wednesday in London. “The Promise” spans 40 years of recent South African history, and kicks off when the mother of a…
