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Documentary traces Idina Menzel’s rise from bat mitzvah performer to Broadway icon
(JTA) — Before becoming one of the most iconic vocal performers of her time, appearing in Broadway shows such as “Rent” and “Wicked” and voicing Queen Elsa in “Frozen,” Idina Menzel got her start singing as a teenager on the wedding and bar and bat mitzvah circuit near where she grew up on Long Island and other parts of the New York area.
“It was everything to me, formatively,” Menzel told JTA in an interview, of her early singing experiences. “I believe… that that had a lot to do with my education in music and genres, but also as a performer. I was so young when I did it… I would lie about my age, I would be 15 or 16 years old and I’d dress all mature and go in in high heels. I would usually be the only woman in a group of six guys.”
In the new documentary “Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage,” which had its world premiere in mid-November at the DOC NYC film festival and lands on Disney+ on Friday, Menzel discusses those experiences, even returning to the main venue where she used to perform at weddings and bar mitzvahs (the Inn at Fox Hollow in Woodbury, New York). The film also shows Menzel in Pittsburgh in the immediate aftermath of the Tree of Life massacre and shows her sharing her thoughts on it as a Jewish person.
The film, directed by Anne McCabe, follows Menzel’s 2018 arena tour, along with Josh Groban, which culminated in Menzel fulfilling her lifelong dream of headlining Madison Square Garden. It combines concerts with intimate behind-the-scenes moments, as well as archival footage from Menzel’s early life and throughout her career.
“When I heard that the tour was going to culminate at Madison Square Garden, I realized that it was a dream come true — it was a place that I’d always wanted to play, growing up on Long Island, and living in New York City, at NYU and beyond that,” Menzel said. “The fact that I was going to be playing there was a big deal, and I wanted to film it, no matter what I did with the footage, I know I just wanted to document it for myself, so I could take that in and really just appreciate the moment.”
As is often the case with documentaries, the film evolved a bit from its original purpose.
The film follows Menzel during a 2018 tour. (Eric Maldin/Walkman Productions Inc.)
“In the process of filming it… it revealed itself in a different way. It became not just a tour documentary going city to city, but more about motherhood, and how we balance trying to pursue our passion and our dreams and also being there for our family,” she said. “That was a welcome surprise in the process.”
The documentary shows Menzel with her then-preteen son — from her previous marriage to Taye Diggs — and her husband, actor Aaron Lohr, while going through the process of in vitro fertilization.
The tour that the film follows arrived in Pittsburgh about two weeks after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre, and Menzel is shown singing the “Rent” number “No Day But Today” to a crowd at Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena. (Menzel more recently wrote and performed a song called “A Tree of Life,” which was featured in the closing credits of a recent HBO documentary about the tragedy and its aftermath.)
In that part of the film, Menzel wears a shirt with a Jewish star that says “Stronger Than Hate.”
“That show was all about tolerance,” Menzel says of “Rent” in the film, while on stage in Pittsburgh. “It was about love, it was about community… I’m sitting here in this beautiful city, a Jewish girl from Long Island. I thought about how we light candles in the Jewish religion, sort of choosing light over darkness, choosing love over bigotry.”
“That particular concert is now tragically defined but what had happened in Pittsburgh, and I felt like I couldn’t ignore that, and I felt like that song was the right song for the moment, and that there was any way I could use my music to help heel then I wanted to do it,” she told JTA.
The documentary also looks back at Menzel’s entire career, from breaking through in the original production of “Rent” in the mid-1990s (the “which way to the stage” subtitle, as “Rent”-heads will know, is a reference to what was Menzel’s very first line in that musical), to an ill-fated run at a pop career, to her second big musical smash, “Wicked,” which landed on Broadway in 2003. Viewers also get the story of the “Frozen” phenomenon and its Menzel-performed torch song “Let it Go,” as well as other notable episodes — such as the time John Travolta mispronounced her name at the Oscars in 2014. (Menzel finds the whole thing hilarious.)
The COVID-19 pandemic was not the only obstacle in getting the documentary, which was mostly filmed four years ago, to the finish line. Menzel said in a post-screening Q&A at DOC NYC that because the documentary ended up on Disney+ and she is the voice of Queen Elsa, some curse words had to be taken out, as did a scene where she clutches a bottle of wine.
“I lost the funding at one point, and so I bought [the film] back,” Menzel said. “I wanted to find people that really believed in it and were going to creatively do right by it. I gambled on myself, which I try to do, and try to make a point of it. I’m just so happy that it’s come to fruition.”
The singer has spoken often about her admiration for another prominent Jewish singer and actress, Barbra Streisand. In her JTA interview, she praised the way Streisand “embraces her Judaism.” In the film, Menzel sings “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from “Funny Girl, the 1968 movie version that starred Streisand.
“I love her because she’s her. There’s no one else like her, and always aspired to be her unique true self. She didn’t change herself for anyone else. I also feel like, from a vocalist’s perspective, her talent is insurmountable. The way she sings, it feels like it’s just coming directly from her soul, it feels effortless. The way she tells the story through her singing, that I don’t think anyone else has.”
Menzel’s career is about to come full circle, with another bar/bat mitzvah-related performance: she is set to co-star in “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” a Netflix movie adapted from the young adult novel by Fiona Rosenbloom and directed by Sammi Cohen. The film will reunite Menzel with Adam Sandler, who played her husband in 2019’s “Uncut Gems” and will do so again in the new movie. (Menzel also brought up her character’s bat mitzvah in that very Jewish-themed film by the Safdie brothers.)
“We were much more dysfunctional in that movie,” Menzel said of “Uncut Gems”.
“You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” does not have a release date but is expected to arrive sometime in 2023. For now, she’s reveling in the documentary.
“It was just such a joy because I got to look back on it… I got to see myself as a little girl again,” Menzel said. “How I always believed in myself, even more so than maybe I do now. There was no one who was going to tell me that I wasn’t going to live my dream one day. I believed that I had something to offer the world, and so it was really emotional for me to see.”
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Toronto Jewish Community Shaken After 3 Synagogue Shootings in Less Than a Week
People attend Canada’s Rally for the Jewish People at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, in December 2023. Photo: Shawn Goldberg via Reuters Connect
Two synagogues in Toronto were targeted by gunfire overnight on Friday, marking the third shooting targeting Jewish institutions in less than a week and intensifying fears of a rapidly deteriorating security climate for Jews and Israelis across Canada.
Local police confirmed that the two synagogues — the Shaarei Shomayim synagogue in North York and the Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto (BAYT) synagogue in Thornhill, both in Ontario’s Greater Toronto Area — suffered gunfire attacks, with multiple bullet holes found in their front windows and exterior walls.
The incidents came just four days after another attack in Toronto, in which a Jewish-owned restaurant and a local synagogue were also hit by gunfire.
Canadian authorities assured the public that they are investigating the incidents and examining any potential links, but no suspects have been identified at this time.
On Sunday, the local Jewish community gathered to confront this relentless wave of antisemitic attacks, standing in solidarity, raising awareness of the growing threats, and calling for meaningful protections for their safety and places of worship.
During a news conference outside the Shaarei Shomayim Synagogue, Sara Lefton, chief development officer of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto, described last week’s attacks as shocking yet not surprising, highlighting the escalating wave of antisemitic violence sweeping Canada.
“We are shaken to our core at this moment,” Lefton said. “It’s beyond anything that we could have imagined.”
She called on “every part of Canadian society” to take action against discrimination toward Jews and Israelis, stressing that government officials must coordinate with concrete commitments and funding to ensure the community feels safe and protected.
“It’s not enough to say our thoughts and prayers are with the Jewish community. This is not a Jewish issue; this is a Canadian issue,” Lefton said.
Toronto-born Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel also condemned the shootings, describing them as “antisemitic terrorism.”
“Anti-Jewish terror is a result of a global failure to confront antisemitism and the hatred directed at the Jewish people,” the Israeli diplomat wrote in a post on X.
Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, urged Ottawa to take strong action to hold those responsible accountable and to strengthen security measures for Jewish institutions nationwide.
“The safety of Canada’s Jewish community must remain a national priority and a collective responsibility,” Moed said in a statement.
Toronto Deputy Mayor Mike Colle pointed out that he has been pressing both provincial and federal governments over the past three years to establish a task force specifically aimed at fighting antisemitism.
“[Local law enforcement] cannot do this alone. This is not a local police matter,” Colle said. “It’s not good enough to make speeches or propose laws now.”
Yet his initiatives stand in sharp contrast to Mayor Olivia Chow’s history of openly anti-Israel statements and positions. In November, several Canadian Jewish groups called on her to apologize and even resign for publicly calling Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip a “genocide”
Like most countries across the Western world, Canada has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Canadian Jews have been hit by a wave of antisemitic incidents, with at least 32 reported across five provinces in just the first week of January this year, according to data collected by the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith.
“Antisemitism in Canada is now accelerating at an increasing rate, spreading across provinces, platforms, and public spaces. That is a warning signal, and it demands more than piecemeal reactions,” the group wrote in a letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to create a Royal Commission that would explore the problem and draft policy proposals for solving it.
In one of the latest antisemitic incidents, a kosher restaurant and a neighboring business in Montreal, the largest city in the province of Quebec, were vandalized last week, with antisemitic graffiti and swastikas spray-painted across their walls.
In another troubling antisemitic incident, a 15-year-old Jewish student in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, has been forced to continue his education online after his school failed to stop repeated antisemitic harassment and bullying.
According to B’nai Brith’s latest audit released last year, antisemitic incidents in 2024 rose 7.4 percent from 2023, with 6,219 adding up to the highest total recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982.
Seventeen incidents occurred on average every day, while online antisemitism exploded a harrowing 161 percent since 2022. As standalone provinces, Quebec and Alberta saw the largest percentage increases, by 215 percent and 160 percent, respectively.
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For the ‘Jazz Rabbi’ of Connecticut, music and Judaism are both about tradition and improvisation
Greg Wall, who has juggled a career as a professional jazz musician while holding down a day job as a pulpit rabbi, has long been known as The Jazz Rabbi. Though he has retired from his job at the Beit Chaverim Synagogue in Westport, Conn., where he served as full-time rabbi for 10 years, he’s still at the synagogue seven days a week.
“Jazz is really a model of how to put your own spin on an inherited tradition,” Wall told me. “And that’s what the practice of Judaism has been for me. I’m part of the tradition, yet I’m trying to come to my own understanding and make certain connections myself, rather than just dial it in by rote.”
The Jazz Rabbi prays three times a day and studies Talmud study daily. But Wall is also devoted to another congregation: Every Thursday night the jazz faithful gathers at a VFW Post in Westport. The shows, known as Jazz at the Post, are organized by the Jazz Society of Fairfield County, a non-profit organization Wall co-founded. He’s the organization’s artistic director.
“This is a really nice chapter of my life,” Wall told me just he as he was getting ready to perform at a sold-out show in late February. “I have people calling me all the time to come play here. A lot of them are Grammy Award-winning jazz artists.”
The venue, which has a capacity of about 80, is usually sold out. Admission is $20 and there is no drink minimum, making it much more affordable than the typical night out at a commercial jazz venue, where admission is often $50 with a two-drink minimum. Because the Jazz at the Post shows take place at a VFW hall, veterans are admitted for $15, as are students.
Wall said that the fact that there’s no adversarial relationship with a restaurant trying to sell food and drink makes for a much better listening experience for jazz lovers.
“People come here to listen to the music,” he told me. “The people that I would go out and listen to in New York now come to Westport. I feel a little guilty that this place is two minutes from my house, but so be it.”
Back in 2009 when Wall got his first pulpit, a part-time gig at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue in Manhattan’s East Village, his group Later Prophets was touring regularly. During his time at the Sixth Street shul, Wall created the Center for Jewish Arts and Literacy, which brought klezmer, jazz and big-band music to the synagogue’s basement social hall, along with Yiddish language and Torah classes. The music series lives on at the Hudson Yards Synagogue in Manhattan, thanks to the efforts of the percussionist Aaron Alexander.
Later Prophets has been inactive in recent years but Wall still plays freelance gigs with various artists and occasionally performs with the guitarist Jon Madoff’s horn-heavy Afrobeat ensemble Zion 80, as well as The Elders, a jazz group led by Frank London, his friend and collaborator of nearly 50 years.
At the VFW hall in Westport, The Jazz Rabbi joins the visiting artists on the bandstand every week. Wall said the experience of playing with different acts, many of whom perform original compositions, has been good for his musical chops. One of the regulars at the Westport shows remarked that when Wall really gets into a groove, he rocks back and forth like he’s davening.
The Jazz at the Post shows have been happening since April 2022 but Wall has been performing locally since 2015. He started playing in the back room of a local eatery known as Restaurant 323. That gig came about after Wall’s impromptu performance at a fundraiser for the Bridgeport community radio station WPKN-FM.
“After he played a couple of bars of music at the WPKN benefit, I was just blown away by his talent,” recalled Richard Epstein, a Bridgeport dentist who serves as vice-president of the Jazz Society. Epstein’s wife Ina Chadwick, a former Forward editor, was running a spoken word performance series at Restaurant 323 and suggested Wall start a jazz night there.
Eric Bilber, a co-founder of the Jazz Society and a board member, said he discovered the Restaurant 323 scene when his wife went to pick up their daughter one night at the Metro-North station in Westport and didn’t come home right away. Their daughter Zina noticed someone playing a stand-up bass and decided they should check it out. They had such a great time that they stayed until the last set.
“And that was it,” Bilber told me. “I went back with them the following week and we’ve been going ever since. We started bringing our friends and everybody that we could think of to try to support this.”
Bilber realized there was a need to start a non-profit after the Westport jazz lovers had collected thousands of dollars by passing around a cigar box at performances to purchase a piano.
“One day he asked Wall, “Who owns the piano?’” Bilber recalled. “And we decided maybe we should start a non-profit.”
The newly created Jazz Society paid $11,000 for a Steinway Model M that was built in 1937. It had served as one of the house pianos at the Village Gate, the iconic Greenwich Village nightclub that closed in 1988.
If a piano can be said to have yichus, the Gate’s Steinway would certainly fit the bill. Thelonius Monk and Nina Simone are among several jazz greats who played it on live albums recorded at the Gate. Mose Allison, Count Basie, Bill Evans, Eddie Palmieri, Sun Ra and McCoy Tyner have banged on its keys too.
Wall had been tipped off to the Model M’s availability by his piano tuner. But all that wear and wear had taken its toll on the instrument, so in 2018 the Jazz Society came up with $15,000 to refurbish it.
Paul Haller, a Stanford-based piano restorer, recalled with a chuckle that Wall brought down a few local pianists to his shop when the repairs were completed. They put the piano through its paces for a couple of hours before declaring they were pleased with the restoration.
Ted Rosenthal, a pianist who teaches at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, performed at the Post with a quintet that included Wall in late February. During the intermission, he reminded me that being a jazz musician means that one night you could be playing at Carnegie Hall and the next night your gig might be at the Carnegie Deli.
“They’ve created a jazz club in a place that wasn’t designed to be a jazz club,” he said. “I think that’s what we need to do because obviously rents in New York are so high that some clubs don’t succeed because of the expenses involved. If you can find a place and build an audience, I think that’s a perfect way to go.”.
“This place is like being in Greenwich Village,” said Alan Phillips, a Westport resident who comes to the Jazz at the Post performances almost every week. “The world-class jazz that we get right here — it’s the best kept secret.”
The post For the ‘Jazz Rabbi’ of Connecticut, music and Judaism are both about tradition and improvisation appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Admin to Designate Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a Terrorist Group
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a US-Paraguay Status of Forces agreement signing ceremony at the State Department in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Mohatt
The Trump administration will soon designate the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan as a terrorist group, the US State Department announced on Monday, following similar steps targeting the global Islamist network’s activity in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan.
“Today, the Department of State is designating the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and intends to designate the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, effective March 16, 2026,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubion said in a statement.
“The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) uses unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology,” Rubio continued, noting the organization receives backing from the Islamist regime in Iran.
“Its fighters, many receiving training and other support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have conducted mass executions of civilians,” the top US diplomat added. “As the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, the Iranian regime has financed and directed malign activities globally through its IRGC. The United States will use all available tools to deprive the Iranian regime and Muslim Brotherhood chapters of the resources to engage in or support terrorism.”
The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood’s armed wing, the al-Baraa Bin Malik Brigade (BBMB), was blacklisted by the US government in September 2025 for its role in Sudan’s ongoing war.
“SMB’s BBMB fighters have conducted mass executions of civilians in areas they captured, and repeatedly and summarily executed civilians based on race, ethnicity, or perceived affiliation with opposition groups,” according to the State Department.
The terrorist designations will deny the Brotherhood’s members access to the US financial system, restricting their access to resources they need to carry out attacks.
“All property and interests in property of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood that are in the United States or that are in possession or control of a US person are blocked. US persons are generally prohibited from conducting business with sanctioned persons,” the State Department warned. “Persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood may expose themselves to sanctions risk. Notably, engaging in certain transactions with them entails risk of secondary sanctions pursuant to counterterrorism authorities.”
The State Department’s announcement came less than two months after the Trump administration designated branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan as terrorist groups.
US President Donald Trump in November signed an executive order directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has long been affiliated with the Brotherhood, drawing both ideological inspiration and even personnel from its ranks.