With his ‘Jewish or antisemitic’ viral videos, Eitan Levine is stepping into a comedy lineage
Though Levine hadn’t heard of Lenny Bruce's Jewish and goyish bit, his act relies on the same intuitive understanding of Jewish vibes
Though Levine hadn’t heard of Lenny Bruce's Jewish and goyish bit, his act relies on the same intuitive understanding of Jewish vibes
A long history of antisemitic violence and exclusion in the former Soviet Union complicates loyalties for expats in the United States.
Kyla Kupferstein Torres, whose mother was Black Jamaican, describes how her father's parents helped form her Jewish identity
It happens at least once every semester: a student learns that I teach courses in Jewish studies at my university here in southeast Texas and comes to visit me during my office hours. In most cases, I have never met this student before, and at first, the conversation is hesitant, as if the student lacks…
The question of “Who is a Jew,” which has been inflaming passions for so long, has recently heated up once again. Almost every day seems to bring news stories that hinge on what qualifies a person to claim Jewish identity. Whether it’s Julia Salazar relying on family lore to claim she is a Jew of…
As a child growing up in Philadelphia, when adults would ask me about my religion, I would answer, with a smile, “I’m nothing!” This resulted in a polite smile mixed with pity and bafflement. My Ukrainian Greek Catholic mother married a Jewish man, as did two of her four sisters. My mom may have married…
The El Al security officer’s dark gaze bored into mine, then flicked over the middle name on my passport. “Shay. That’s Arabic, isn’t it?” “No, it’s Irish.” I was being questioned for my Birthright boarding pass for my first trip to Israel and it wasn’t going well. The rapid-fire inquiries left me reeling: Was I…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As editor of the Forverts, most of the questions I get from readers involve either the price of an obituary or a request to decipher a handwritten postcard written by a deceased relative. Recently, though, I got an email with a very different sort of question: “I’d…
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