2021 has turned out to be another unpredictable year. As wave after wave of news stories reporting death and mayhem rolled over us, I found myself thinking about the Enlightenment.
London-based comedian Rachel Creeger, cohost of the podcast, “Jew Talkin’ To Me?”, talks about growing up in a traditional home and listening to the men in the family tell jokes on Shabbat and how it feels to now be the only Orthodox Jewish woman on the British comedy circuit. Rachel is in conversation with Michael Krasny, retired public radio host of KQED Forum and the author of Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means.
Both Rachel and Michael are part of the Moment Symposium “What is Your Favorite Jewish Joke – And Why?”
In 1980, we wrote about the fight to boycott the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin—and why the protest ultimately didn’t come to pass.
When important baseball games fall on Shabbat or the High Holy Days, what’s a Jewish baseball player to do?
Believe it or not, I grew up in a Jewish family that didn’t tell jokes.
Own a piece of history! This was what the listing for the “Solomon Cohen House,” built in 1875, urged prospective buyers to do.
In this time of corrective unnamings—to remove traces of admiration or gratitude for the morally reevaluated—the names of unrepentant slaveholders, Confederate generals, contemporary sexual predators and other assorted wrongdoers have been erased or proposed for erasure from college dorms, military bases, city streets and more.
How did the Satmar Hasidim come to dominate the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg?
At the Museum at Eldridge Street’s Egg Rolls, Egg Creams and Empanadas street festival—a celebration of Ashkenazi Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican communities held each summer (pre-pandemic) on New York’s Lower East Side—groups of Chinese Americans and American Jewish women play mahjong side by side, sometimes pausing to teach younger festivalgoers how to play.
Even those familiar with the prolific English novelist and essayist Jenny Diski (1947-2016) don’t think of her as primarily a “Jewish” writer.
In March, Franklin Graham, the culture warrior evangelist and vociferous defender of former President Donald Trump, urged Christians to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
