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Critic’s account of classical music after the Holocaust is named Jewish book of the year

(JTA) — Music critic Jeremy Eichler’s study of how classical composers made music after the Holocaust was named the book of the year by the Jewish Book Council, which presented the National Jewish Book Awards Wednesday at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan.
“Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance” was named the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year and won both the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial History Award and the Holocaust Award in Memory of Ernest W. Michel. The book explores how four towering composers who lived through the Second World War transformed their experiences into what Eichler calls “intensely charged memorials in sound.”
James McBride won two National Jewish Book Awards for fiction for his novel “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store,” a sprawling whodunit centering on a small Pennsylvania town whose Jewish and African-American residents find common cause in the 1920s and 1930s.
McBride won the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction and The Miller Family Book Club Award in Memory of Helen Dunn Weinstein and June Keit Miller.
The son of a Jewish mother and African-American father, McBride has said the book is based in part on his Jewish grandmother, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in a small Virginia town and worked in her family’s store.
The National Jewish Book Awards, in their 73rd year, are an opportunity to “bring to the fore books that may give readers one more way, perhaps a new way, to connect with their Judaism,” said Elisa Spungen Bildner, president of the Jewish Book Council, in a statement.
The awards for books published in 2023 were to be presented Wednesday evening at the JCC Manhattan as part of its Books That Changed My Life festival.
Ruth Madievsky won the the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction for her novel “All-Night Pharmacy,” about a troubled young woman and the Soviet Jewish refugee who purports to act as her spiritual guide.
Benjamin Balint received the Biography Award in Memory of Sara Berenson Stone for his book “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History,” an examination of the life and legacy of the enigmatic Polish writer.
Sabrina Orah Mark’s memoir “Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales” was awarded the Krauss Family Award in Memory of Simon & Shulamith (Sofi) Goldberg for Autobiography & Memoir. The essays in the book use fairy tales as jumping off points to talk about motherhood, family and the challenges of raising mixed-race children.
Elizabeth Graver’s novel “Kantika,” a 20th-century saga about a Turkish-Jewish family and their immigration to America, won the Sephardic Culture Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy. Yariv Inbar won the Hebrew Fiction in Translation Jane Weitzman Award for his book “Operation Bethlehem,” which is self-translated.
The Modern Jewish Thought and Experience Dorot Foundation Award in Memory of Joy Ungerleider was awarded to Jeremy Brown for his book “The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19.”
The book council also presented its annual mentorship award, named in honor of the JBC’s former executive director, Carolyn Starman Hessel, to Altie Karper, who retired this past December as editorial director of Schocken, the venerable Jewish publishing house. The judges said Karper “has been at the forefront of promoting Jewish literature, and truly upholding the history and mission of Schocken Books” while helping to “publish some of the most important Jewish books in recent history.”
Other National Jewish Book Award winners include:
The Nahum Sarna Memorial Scholarship Award: “Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture,” by Mira Balber
The Children’s Picture Book Tracy and Larry Brown Family Award: “Two New Years,” by Richard Ho, illustrated by Lynn Scurfield
The Young Adult Literature Award: “The Blood Years,” by Elana K. Arnold
The Middle Grade Literature Award: “The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman,” by Mari Lowe. (The three youth awards were announced earlier this week.)
The Jane and Stuart Weitzman Family Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks: “Kibbitz & Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria,” by Marcia Bricker Halperin
The Berru Poetry Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash: “When There Was Light,” by Carlie Hoffman
The Holocaust Memoir Award in Memory of Dr. Charles and Ethel Weitzman: “The Ghost Tattoo,” by Tony Bernard
See the complete list of the 73rd National Jewish Book Award winners and finalists.
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The post Critic’s account of classical music after the Holocaust is named Jewish book of the year appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Australia’s Spy Chief Warns Surge in Antisemitism Across Country Has ‘Not Yet Plateaued’

Southern Sydney Synagogue in the suburb of Allawah, Australia, was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti on Jan. 10, 2024. Photo: Screenshot
The head of Australia’s domestic intelligence agency has revealed that five major terrorist plots were prevented over the past year, amid a wave of antisemitic incidents in recent months that has alarmed the country’s Jewish community.
Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), delivered his annual threat assessment on Wednesday, warning that Australia has never faced so many serious national security threats at once. The agency declassified its security outlook for the next five years, raising concerns about the increasing threat of state-sanctioned murder.
Burgess disclosed that his organization had identified “at least three” countries plotting to “physically harm people” living in Australia over the past 12 months.
“It goes without saying that plots like these are repugnant,” he said. “They not only involve plans to hurt people — obviously bad enough — they are shocking assaults on Australian sovereignty and the freedoms we hold dear.”
Based on the agency’s predictions, the coming years will be more volatile and dangerous as countries like Russia and Iran become increasingly aggressive, the spy chief asserted.
“Over the next five years, a complex, challenging, and changing security environment will become more dynamic, more diverse, and more degraded,” Burgess said during his speech at ASIO headquarters in Canberra on Wednesday night.
“If the spy game has a rule book, it is being rewritten. If there are red lines, they are being blurred — or deliberately rubbed out.”
When speaking about the shocking surge in antisemitic attacks that have been spreading across Australia since the beginning of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Burgess warned these incidents might only get worse as extremists are increasingly self-radicalizing and “choosing their own adventure” toward potential terrorist activity.
“Threats transitioned from harassment and intimidation to specific targeting of Jewish communities, places of worship, and prominent figures,” he said. “I am concerned these attacks have not yet plateaued.”
Several Jewish sites in Australia have been targeted with vandalism and even arson in recent months, continuing a rise in antisemitism that began with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. A recent report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) found that antisemitism in Australia quadrupled to record levels following the outbreak of the Gaza war, with Australian Jews experiencing more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024.
Burgess described how narratives originally centered on “freeing Palestine” have expanded to include incitements to “kill the Jews.”
Last week, Australia experienced its latest scandal in which two nurses were caught on video vowing to kill Israeli patients, prompting outrage from authorities.
At Bankstown Hospital in Sydney, two nurses, Ahmad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, were seen making inflammatory statements in a video that surfaced online, during a night-shift discussion with Israeli social media personality Max Veifer.
The footage featured Lebdeh stating she would refuse to treat an Israeli patient and would instead kill them, while Nadir used a throat-slitting gesture when he confessed to having already killed many.
“It’s Palestine’s country, not your country, you piece of s—t,” Lebdeh told Veifer. “One day your time will come, and you will die the most disgusting death.”
After the video went viral, both nurses were suspended and permanently barred from employment within the New South Wales state health system.
Following the incident, the health minister of the state of Victoria, Mary-Anne Thomas, directed health-care facilities across the state to remove anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian badges and markings, declaring that political displays in hospitals are “unacceptable” and “will not be tolerated.”
Jews in Australia have questioned their safety at hospitals across the country amid a flurry of anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus coming from health-care facilities.
Last year, ASIO raised the national terror threat level from possible to probable and warned Australian defense personnel about being targeted by foreign spies.
“Australia has entered a period of strategic surprise and security fragility,” Burgess said on Wednesday.
As the country’s federal elections approach in the coming months, the federal government warned foreign embassies about attempts to interfere, including planting news stories about candidates or instructing people on how to protest.
Burgess warned that “high-impact sabotage,” such as attacks on nuclear-powered submarines or major cyberattacks, is becoming more likely, along with “state-sponsored or state-supported terrorism.” He singled out Russia, which could target Australia due to its support for Ukraine, and Iran as potential threats to Australia and its allies.
“A small number of authoritarian regimes are behaving more aggressively, more recklessly, more dangerously,” he said. “More willing to engage in what we call ‘high-harm’ activities.”
Burgess’s comments came after law enforcement in Australia last month started an investigation into the origins behind the spree of recent antisemitic crimes, announcing they suspect individuals outside the country have coordinated the campaign of hate.
Burgess also revealed that cyber units from at least one nation-state “routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future.”
The post Australia’s Spy Chief Warns Surge in Antisemitism Across Country Has ‘Not Yet Plateaued’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli Singer Noa Kirel Leads New Rom-Com Series With Argentine Pop Star Agustin Bernasconi

Agustín Bernasconi and Noa Kirel co-star in the new series “NOA.” Photo: Provided
Israeli singer Noa Kirel is starring alongside Argentine actor and fellow pop singer Agustín Bernasconi in a new music-centered romantic comedy series that will begin filming in March, The Algemeiner has learned.
The 25-episode series “NOA,” which will be filmed entirely in Argentina, is a global co-production from Argentina’s FAM Contenidos and Israel’s entertainment studio Sipur.
In the series, Noa (Kirel) travels to Argentina to meet her boyfriend, after months of having a long-distance relationship, but things don’t turn out the way she thought they would. She then meets Tomy (Bernasconi), “a young man who tries to reconcile with his past and forge a new life away from music, all while Noa begins a journey of discovery in search of her musical identity, while dealing with pressure from her parents and her new reality in Buenos Aires,” according to a provided synopsis.
Kirel is a singer, rapper, songwriter, dancer, and actress. She competed on behalf of Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023 and finished third with her song “Unicorn.” She was also formerly a judge on “Israel’s Got Talent.”
Bernasconi is an Argentine actor, singer, composer, and musician, with over 100 million views on YouTube.
“It will be a great experience to star in the series with Noa,” said Bernasconi. “She is an exceptional artist, and we complement each other very well.”
“NOA” producer and Dori Media Group founder Yair Dori, who originated the series, said: “I am very proud to be part of this great project, which I believe will have a very solid performance worldwide.”
Sipur CEO Emilio Schenker added: “NOA marks the beginning of our co-financing and co-producing major IP franchises globally. I can’t think of a better team or first project to invest in outside of Israel. It fits perfectly with our mandate to bring high-quality fiction, documentary, and unscripted projects to the world through high-level strategic partnerships and the support of powerful investors.”
Sipur’s latest projects include the Hebrew-language scripted drama series “Bad Boy,” from original “Euphoria” creator and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Ron Leshem and Hagar Ben-Asher. Netflix acquired streaming rights for “Bad Boy” in November 2024. Sipur’s recent works also include the medical thriller series “Heart of a Killer,” starring “Tehran” lead actress Niv Sultan, the documentary “We Will Dance Again,” “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes,” and the documentary series “Munich ’72” about the Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany.
The showrunners for “NOA” are Alejandro Cacetta and Mili Roque Pitt, and the director is Mauro Scandolari.
The post Israeli Singer Noa Kirel Leads New Rom-Com Series With Argentine Pop Star Agustin Bernasconi first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Freed Hamas Hostage Agam Berger Begs Trump to Help Get Israeli Captives Home: ‘Don’t Stop Until All Are Back’

Released Israeli hostage, Agam Berger, a soldier who was seized from her army base in southern Israel during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, is reunited with her parents following her release, in a handout photo obtained by Reuters on Jan. 30, 2025. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
Former Hamas hostage Agam Berger urged US President Donald Trump to continue pushing for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages in a Hebrew-language video message that the president shared on his Truth Social app on Monday night.
A soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, Berger, 20, also thanked Trump for helping to secure her release from Hamas captivity in Gaza last month.
“I want to take this chance to say to you, President Trump: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you’ve done and continue to do for the hostages,” Berger said in the clip. “Thanks to you, we’re home. But we must remember there are still people who truly depend on you and are waiting for you to save them. They’re waiting for your help and you have the power to do it.”
Berger was kidnapped from the IDF’s Nahal Oz military base on Oct. 7, 2023, along with four other Israeli soldiers. Dozens of IDF soldiers were murdered at the military outpost. Berger was released from Hamas captivity in January a week after four of her fellow IDF soldiers, as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and the US-designated terrorist organization.
The ceasefire deal took effect the day before Trump entered office last month and it put a pause to the 15-month war in Gaza. The agreement was mediated by the outgoing Biden and incoming Trump administrations, and the framework of the agreement was agreed upon last year.
“I beg you, don’t stop until all the hostages, both living and deceased, are brought back as quickly as possible,” Berger also told Trump in her video message. She then talked about her time in Hamas captivity, saying: “I went through many hardships there. The days didn’t pass. They stood still. Every night and day felt eternity. That’s how those [hostages] still feel there.”
“We must act fast to bring everyone home. They’re just waiting to be rescued,” she added.
Monday marked 500 days since Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists infiltrated southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, slaughtered 1,200 people, and took 251 hostages back to the Gaza Strip. Seventy-three men, women, and children remain in Hamas captivity. The bodies of four deceased hostages will be returned to Israel on Thursday, two days before the next round of living hostages will be released.
The post Freed Hamas Hostage Agam Berger Begs Trump to Help Get Israeli Captives Home: ‘Don’t Stop Until All Are Back’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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