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Culture Mel Brooks delivers 500 pages on his favorite subject – himself
All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business By Mel Brooks Ballantine Books, 480 pages, $25 Mel Brooks’ memoir begins with a promise. In a preface, the 95-year-old actor-writer-director vows to make an intimate confession to his reader — one not to be shared with anyone. Then, he thinks a bit more about the…
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News As Arizona tilts further right, these Mexican-American Jewish siblings push back
While headlines focus on the Arizona’s questionable audits, its challenges to voting rights and its fur-clad QAnon shaman, insiders say if you want to understand the deeper shifts going on in the state’s politics, watch the Hernandez siblings. Arizona is no stranger to political dynasties – the Goldwaters, Udalls and McCains. But no one’s ever…
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Culture Is ‘Charm Circle’ a Jewish ‘Grey Gardens,’ or a failed therapy session?
The first thing I did after finishing “Charm Circle” was clean my room. Named for a patch of Kew Garden Hills in Queens, NY, where red brick semidetached homes form a pseudo suburb, the documentary by Nira Burstein is as intimate — and dirty — as filmmaking gets. Burstein follows her parents, Uri and Raya,…
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Opinion A 4-year-old Jewish girl died in Toronto. We need to talk about why
Do you know who little Keira Kagan was? I want to tell you about her. Keira had blonde-brown hair, cute little glasses and a beautiful smile. Her mother described her as “smart and spunky,” someone who “loved to get dressed up to get into her princess dress and be fancy.” She lived in Toronto and…
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News Sarah Silverman shows up for ‘kick-ass’ sister Susan’s foster and adoption cause
You know the headliner must be really important when her warm-up act is Sarah Silverman. “Without further ado, a Jew,” the comedian said as she introduced her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman. The Oct. 3 celebrity-studded event at the home of actors Bradley Whitford and Amy Landecker was a fundraiser for the rabbi’s organization, Second Nurture,…
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News Who are Chicago Jews, and what do they want? The results are in.
Amid many gloomy predictions that American Jewry is shrinking, disengaging and assimilating, comes bracing news from Chicago: um, maybe not. A just-released Chicago Jewish population study — the largest one ever — found that the community is instead growing and diversifying: • The study shows that the Jewish population in Chicago is nearly 320,000, an…
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Culture When Pancho Villa attacked the U.S. in 1916, he was after the head of this Jewish merchant
When Pancho Villa and his troops raided Columbus, New Mexico in 1916—one of the only times in the 20th century that a foreign army ever invaded the continental United States— the famous Mexican revolutionary had only one goal: to bring back the head of a Lithuanian-born Jewish merchant named Sam Ravel. Villa’s men ransacked the…
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News ‘You are stronger than you think’— a message for domestic violence victims
A Chicago Jewish mother struggled in her relationship with her child’s father, but it wasn’t until she turned for help to a local Jewish agency that the reason became clear: she was a victim of domestic abuse. “For the first time, I felt heard and understood” said M., whose identity has been obscured for her…
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FIRST PERSON As a rabbi, he helped others mourn. So why wouldn’t his daughter say kaddish for him?
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Fast Forward Haaretz faces blowback after liberal Israeli paper’s publisher praises ‘Palestinian freedom fighters’
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Fast Forward American Airlines won’t fly to Israel again until at least September 2025
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