Italian scholar Cesare Colafemmina, an internationally known pioneer in the study of Jewish history and culture in southern Italy, has died. Colafemmina died Wednesday after a long illness at the age of 79. A university professor, archeologist and specialist in Jewish inscriptions and ancient history, Colafemmina wrote and researched extensively on the Jewish presence in…
With her new book, “Rav Hisda’s Daughter: Book 1, Apprentice,” Maggie Anton, author of the “Rashi’s Daughters” trilogy, unearths a different chapter of Jewish history, giving readers a peek into what life may have been like for a Jewish woman in 3rd century Babylonia. Weaving together research on the religious life and culture, the sociology…
President Barack Obama has been spending a lot of time recently with old Jewish documents. First, there he took a look at 150-year-old papers documenting the Jewish community’s appeal to President Abraham Lincoln. They hoped to get Lincoln to overturn an order by General Ulysses Grant to prevent Jews from serving in the military department…
Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israel’s prime minister, who died on April 30 at the age of 102, belonged to that generation of Jewish scholars who believed that what they studied, wrote about and taught had an importance that transcended academic interests. These learned individuals imagined that what they had discovered not only shed light…
It’s no small feat to capture generations of hardship in the span of a single theater production. But somehow, the theater collective The Lost and Found Project has managed to do just that, in their experimental play ”Doroga” (or “Road,” in Russian). In the words of the creators, ”Doroga” is “an interactive play that explores…
Bernard Bellush, a labor historian and activist, has died of natural causes at age 94. Bernard Bellush, who was an editor of the the Forverts’s English supplement and served on the Forward Association’s board, died Friday night at a hospital, his wife, Jewel Bellush, wrote in a message to friends. Bernard Bellush was raised in…
At the end of a long day of peaceful demonstrations in Oakland this past November, a few hundred protesters — many wearing masks or covering their faces with bandanas — massed for a night of rage, smashing windows, chucking rocks and sparking bonfires. In the aftermath, the city’s police chief described the perpetrators as “generally…
Computer scientists at Tel Aviv University are using artificial intelligence to gather the fragments of the world’s largest collection of medieval documents, the legendary Cairo Genizah, to tell the story of 1,000 years of Jewish history and culture. They have reconstructed more than 1,000 documents from 350,000 individual items found in the Cairo storage room:…
100% of profits support our journalism
