In the period before the High Holidays, it’s traditional for Jews to visit the graves of departed family members and recite kaddish, the mourner’s prayer. In the New York area, many of the sprawling Jewish cemeteries date back at least a century and were chosen by immigrant communities seeking a burial place for their landsmen ...

Football season is upon us once again—it kicks off on Rosh Hashanah, with a game between the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints and the Minnesota Vikings, a team that boasts the only Jewish quarterback in the NFL, Sage Rosenfels. (His playing time has been eclipsed mightily by Brett Favre.)
But Rosenfels isn’t the only Jew ...

In the early 20th century, a group of Jewish composers including Joel Engel in Moscow and Mikhail Gnesin in St. Petersburg sought to find, record, and preserve the music of the shtetls in the Pale of Settlement. They then used that music as inspiration for their own high art compositions, hoping to create a Jewish ...

David Preiss

Skipp Porteous has been a minister, a First Amendment activist, a convert to Judaism, and a mole hired by the FBI to infiltrate neo-Nazi groups. But it’s his work over the past few years as a private investigator that led him to the famously unsolved case of a man known only by the ...

Fresh out of college, Rachel Shukert, who majored in acting, landed a job with a theater company bound for Central Europe. In her new memoir, Everything Is Going to Be Great, she recounts the pleasures and humiliations of her time abroad, unabashedly exposing her own prejudices and the prejudices of others. For this ...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding in what is now Israel of the first kibbutz, called Degania (“Wheat of God”). From there, the kibbutz movement took off, and though kibbutzniks never comprised more than 4 percent of Israeli society, they went on to play an outsize role in the country’s politics, ...

This week, Vox Tablet invites listeners to consider some unconventional summer reading. Gary Shteyngart and Joshua Cohen have both come out with new novels that paint a very dark picture of the future. In Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart envisions a not-so-distant world in which the United States is a crumbling, militarized empire, ...

Israel may be a small country, but when it comes to classical music, it’s a powerhouse. From his position on the board of New York’s Mannes School of Music, David P. Goldman has had the chance to witness Israeli prominence in the field firsthand. In an effort to get a better handle on the phenomenon, ...

The Bowls Project is an unusual sound and architectural installation now on display at the Yerba Buena Center for Arts in San Francisco. A combination of a song cycle, a double-vaulted masonry dome, strangers’ secrets, and inscriptions found in Babylonian Jewish amulets known as “demon bowls,” the Bowls Project is the creation of the ...

Two years ago, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which is devoted to the study and preservation of Ashkenazic culture, published the trailblazing Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. A remarkable resource, it offers some 1,800 entries on everything from general topics like art to key figures like Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. Earlier ...