World News
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As Americans drink much less wine, kosher demand stays strong
(JTA) — OXNARD, California — On Friday nights, in Jewish homes around the world, a familiar ritual unfolds: a blessing over wine, poured into a cup and passed around the table. That ritual, multiplied during Passover, may help explain why kosher wine is holding steady even as the broader wine industry struggles. Across the United…
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Forverts podcast episode 11: Passover
דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט שוין אַרויסגעלאָזט דעם עלעפֿטן קאַפּיטל פֿונעם ייִדישן פּאָדקאַסט, Yiddish With Rukhl. דאָס מאָל איז די טעמע „פּסח“. אין דעם קאַפּיטל וועט איר הערן צוויי אַרטיקלען. דער ערשטער, געשריבן פֿון אַני הקטנה, איז וועגן די אַמאָליקע סעקולערע ייִדן וואָס האָבן אָפּגעריכט אַ טראַדיציאָנעלן סדר. דער קאַפּיטל נעמט אַרײַן אַ רעקאָרדירונג פֿון אַזאַ סדר…
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It’s getting more dangerous to be a comedian — but was it ever safe?
Can We Laugh at That?: Comedy in a Conflicted Age Jacques Berlinerblau University of California Press, 256 pages, $24.95 Even in these polarized, politically turbulent times, Jacques Berlinerblau argues that the United States still agrees — mostly — on the importance of free speech, in all its complexity and messiness. He calls this the Pre-Digital…
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Birthright travelers look different after Oct. 7 – but the effect remains the same, study shows
(JTA) — Len Saxe, a researcher at Brandeis University, has been studying the impact of Birthright trips to Israel since the initiative launched in 1999. Last year, he noticed something unusual in the data. At a rate far outpacing anything he’d ever detected before, people who signed up for Birthright in summer 2025 but did…
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The promised land is… Oklahoma? Inside Tulsa’s campaign to court young Jews
TULSA, Okla. — The house had prairie views, four bedrooms and a pantry large enough to support a small diaspora. More than 50 people wandered through the kitchen inspecting cabinets, opening drawers and video chatting with relatives back home as if they had stumbled upon a newly discovered continent. They were not, strictly speaking, house…
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Through missile strikes and sleepless nights, the persistent hope of being an Iranian Jew in Israel
For weeks, I lived in Tel Aviv as missiles streaked across the sky overhead. I heard sirens day and night, disrupting sleep and leaving me constantly bracing for the next alert. I ran to dozens of shelters across the city, waiting tensely as interceptions echoed overhead. And yet, when I decided to leave Israel amid…
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Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world
In TikTok videos viewed tens of thousands of times, 31-year-old Dan Sheena dons a blond wig and acts out skits of a bickering Iraqi couple in a language that is nearly extinct: Judeo-Arabic. Sheena began posting videos on TikTok in 2023, speaking the endangered language, which today is rarely spoken by anyone under the age…
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‘Buffer zones’ come to California, as a lawmaker proposes limiting protests near houses of worship
(JTA) — A California lawmaker is introducing a bill that would create a buffer zone around houses of worship, the latest effort by lawmakers to respond to protests against Israel that have taken place outside synagogues. Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, a Jewish Democrat representing a suburban district in the San Francisco Bay Area, unveiled AB 2664,…
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The first and second Jewish mayors of Providence, Rhode Island, just had a shared bar mitzvah
(JTA) — It is not every day a sitting mayor celebrates his bar mitzvah. But last Saturday, as more than 700 people packed the pews at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island, that’s exactly what unfolded. At the center of the ceremony at the Reform synagogue on the East Side of Providence was the city’s…
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‘Jew-FK Jr.’: Meet the Connecticut dad and children’s book author who won a JFK Jr. lookalike contest
(JTA) — Since he was 22, Andrew Ginsburg has been inundated with comments that he resembles the late John F. Kennedy Jr. Now 46, he says those comparisons have reached a new high, fueled by the spotlight on JFK Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, in the popular new FX series Love Story. The…
