Eric Clapton headlined the fifth annual Life Festival in Oswiecim, Poland late this month. Yes, you read that right. Eric Clapton just played Auschwitz. Well, kind of. The Oswiecim Life Festival started in 2010, and was created by Darek Maciborek, a radio DJ, who wanted to change the negative associations brought up by his hometown….
Amid fresh warnings of anti-Semitism in Hungary, some 100,000 Jews from across Europe are expected to attend Budapest’s largest-ever Jewish Summer Festival. The week-long cultural festival, which opened Saturday, is being hosted for the 16th year running by the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, or MAZSIHISZ, and co-organized by the Israeli Jewish Congress. “Part of…
In the sultry darkness of a summer night, a tall, skinny figure with close-cropped hair and a purple T-shirt threaded through a beer garden during Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival, the annual nine-day extravaganza of performance, exhibition, debate and intensive interaction that for a quarter of a century now has been a catalyst of Krakow’s Jewish…
Heading north to Montreal this summer? If you’re not, you should be. Aside from being the three months out of the year when the city doesn’t look like a snow globe, summertime is festival time in Montreal. From June until mid-September, the newly laid-out Place des Festivals is aglow with lights, sounds, crowds, music and…
Apparently Auschwitz, symbol of the Final Solution and gravesite to over two million Jews, is now a hot concert venue. Last weekend marked the third annual Life Festival Oświęcim 2013, which seeks “to build peaceful relations beyond cultural and state borders where there is no place for anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of xenophobia,” according…
Babushki chattering in Russian, store awnings adorned in Cyrillic, the scent of fresh pierogi in the air — for decades, these displaced attributes of Soviet culture have been characteristic of Brighton Beach, New York’s Russian-speaking enclave in the southern tip of Brooklyn. While much of the borough was busy gentrifying, Brighton managed to stay frozen…
The National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene has announced that it will be creating a new, bi-annual international festival of Jewish performing arts, the New York Times reports. “Kulturfest,” which will also be named after Yiddish preservationist and anthologist Chana Mlotek, will begin in 2015, to coincide with the Folksbiene’s 100th anniversary. It will be officially presented at…
Tourists heading to Israel hit an all-time high in the first quarter of 2012. From January through March, 637,200 tourists arrived in Israel, up 2% compared with the same period last year. While part of the uptick is due to factors out of Israel’s control, such as economic recovery, large numbers of tourists are being…
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