Chemical weapons, nuclear debris and Mossad agents in biohazard suits all have played prominent roles in the dozens of conspiracy theories surrounding the crash of an El Al airplane here 20 years ago this month. But Rob Oudkerk, vice chairman of the Dutch parliament’s inquiry into the deadly crash, has studied and dismissed them all….
It took me a while to feel acclimated and comfortable in Amsterdam, the city where I studied abroad. Riding my bicycle along those too-worn streets was terrifying at first—surrounded by spinning cars and fast-talking people who smiled with wide wide teeth. Everywhere I went, there was meat and French fries and eight different kinds of…
Leave your headphones at home. Charlotte Friedman, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor, tells her story for the first time in a two part video series produced by Jewish.TV, the multimedia branch of Chabad.org. The twist? Friedman, who is deaf, conducted the interview entirely in American Sign Language. The videos are part of a joint effort between…
Although they’ve had a number of earlier releases, “Where we come from… Where we’re going,” a challenging CD that is almost equal parts avant-garde jazz and klezmer music, was my introduction to Klezmokum, an Amsterdam-based band (Mokum is the old Jewish name for Amsterdam) led by Burton Greene, a pianist with a long history and…
Earlier this week, Lavie Tidhar wrote about Jewish vampires and Hebrew punks and searching for Osama. His new novel, “An Occupation of Angels,” is now available. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on…
The 19th century Dutch painter Meijer de Haan (1852-1895), whose life was cut short by tuberculosis, has been so overshadowed by his mentor Paul Gauguin that even New York’s MoMA, which owns Gauguin’s 1889 portrait of de Haan, misidentifies the sitter as “Jacob Meyer de Haan” (sic). More than merely getting de Haan’s name right,…
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