A Chicago Jewish couple who were married for 69 years died moments apart in the same hospital room while holding hands. Teresa Vatkin, 89, died at 12:10 a.m. Saturday at Highland Park Hospital, and her husband, Isaac, died at approximately 12:50 a.m. as they wheeled his wife from the room and their hands separated, according…
Paul Traynor’s documentary “New Trier: The Tip of the Spear” explains in deep detail all the elements of a seemingly local controversy that flared up last February at New Trier High School, a nationally distinguished public school in suburban Chicago’s heavily Jewish North Shore. If the film is to be believed, the angry dispute that…
Writers, artists, and scholars will spend three days this weekend enlightening Chicagoans on various aspects of what the late comic George Carlin immortalized as “Stuff”: collecting it, organizing it, and having too much of it. The symposium, sponsored by the the Chicago Humanities Spring Fest, does not directly involve Jews. But Jews are probably involved…
Students at New Trier High School were pleased and excited when Andrew Aydin, a close associate of civil rights icon and Democratic Congress member John Lewis, agreed to speak at their school on civil rights; even more so when Colson Whitehead, the widely lauded author of the best-selling novel, “The Underground Railroad,” agreed to join…
CHICAGO (JTA) — The platter, served during Passover, contained a green, a bitter herb, an egg and matzah. But it was no seder plate. Instead, it was the appetizer served during a six-course prix fixe meal at Aviv, a pop-up, kosher-for-Passover restaurant housed for one night at Rodfei Zedek, a Conservative synagogue in the Hyde…
As of last week, there are now two Jews and three billionaires in the 2018 Illinois governor’s race. Following several months of speculation local business mogul J.B. Pritzker officially thrown his hat into the ring on April 6. The move came two weeks after he formed an exploratory committee with $200,000 of his own money,…
At an early Passover seder last week at the City Winery, the poet Kevin Coval was, to the surprise of no one, assigned the Hagaddah reading of the Rebellious Child, an updating of the old-school Wicked Son. It’s been Coval’s nature to question all forms of established dogma, going back to his Hebrew school days…
Starting today, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) will begin a five day performance run one of the all time great “lost works” of music – Igor Stravinsky’s “Chant Funebre” (Funeral Song). The piece, a short orchestral work, was written in 1908 on the occasion of the death of Stravinsky’s mentor Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. As the story goes,…
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