The new Netflix reality show “My Unorthodox Life,” which depicts the life and family of Julia Haart, a formerly Orthodox woman who left her community and now runs a top modeling agency, is generating discomfort, debate, and some loud objections about the nature of Jewish and Orthodox representation on-screen. But Elon Gold, for one, would…
The Arkansas Times, a small monthly in Little Rock, hasn’t written a single article about Ben & Jerry’s recent decision to end sales in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Yet despite running a newspaper that he called “about as local and provincial as you can be,” publisher Alan Leveritt is at the center of a legal…
An intense campaign to derail a Los Angeles teachers’ union resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is working, say members of Jewish groups that banded together to defeat it. Pressure from the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, the Anti-Defamation League and a host of other Jewish groups will likely mean the union will…
Gerda Weissfeld’s faux poodle sat in her lap and barked as she pet him. “You’re a good boy,” Weissfeld, 102, told the beige-and-white puppy as he continued to bark, seemingly in response to her touch. “He is an intelligent doggy. I call him Peter,” she said. “Sometimes you think he’s real.” Weissfeld, Great Neck, L.I.,…
The cheering from Kibbutz Gezer is going to be so loud that Alon Leichman may hear it as he takes to the mound in Tokyo as a pitcher for Team Israel’s baseball team. That’s because his proud parents – David Leichman and Rabbi Miri Gold – will be shouting and clapping along with other family…
Just a few years ago, at a gathering of filmmakers during the annual Berlin Film Festival, I was asked by a perplexed newcomer to the festival scene why the oldest and largest Jewish film festival in the world took place in, of all places, San Francisco. As a native-born San Francisco Jew and a former…
(JTA) — Sid Marantz loves tradition so much that he spent 20 years as a board member of his family’s Los Angeles synagogue. So it’s a big deal that he isn’t in Tokyo this week for the start of the Olympics, the first Summer Games he’s missed since 1984. Marantz usually attends for three weeks:…
(JTA) — The leadership team at Ikar, a synagogue in Los Angeles, had just begun planning to move their services indoors. They had gone through a year of virtual services followed by several months of outdoor services for members vaccinated against COVID-19. Then the Delta variant hit. Now the synagogue, like many across the country,…
Ruth Pearl, who died July 20 at the age of 85, fought a thousand battles in her lifetime. She didn’t look like a warrior— barely five feet tall, rail thin with cropped brown hair and a soft voice that quavered, especially as she fought respiratory problems in later life. But when I first met her,…
A 32-year-old Los Gatos man who police say carried a cache of weapons and high-capacity magazines in his pickup truck, along with a journal bearing racist and antisemitic writings, expressed “an idea of setting up a community with only whites,” his lawyer described in a court filing set for a hearing this week. Wesley Martines…
(JTA) — This article originally appeared on Alma. There are quite a few athletes who have been called the G.O.A.T., or greatest of all time: quarterback Tom Brady, basketball player Michael Jordan and swimmer Michael Phelps, just to name a few. But gymnast Simone Biles? She might just be the best of the bunch. I…
