World News

(New York Jewish Week) — What happens when the country’s premier newspaper names a hole-in-the-wall kosher falafel joint as one of the 100 best restaurants in New York? Hundreds of people show up every day, creating lines that occasionally snake out the door. News stations from across the globe ask for interviews, catering requests come…

(JTA) — Chicago Cubs first baseman Matt Mervis is selling T-shirts and hats emblazoned with his nickname spelled in Hebrew to raise money for the Israel Association of Baseball. “It’s a great cause to help grow the game in Israel,” Mervis told MLB.com on Thursday, “and try to build some fields over there.” Mervis, who…

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration has joined the chorus of American voices criticizing Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli. A photo making a face at a pro-Israel parade in New York City, and his unapologetic defense of the incident, is evidence that he is out of touch with the U.S. Jewish Diaspora, a senior Biden…

(JTA) — British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran came close to setting the attendance record at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on Sunday, drawing a crowd of 89,106 concertgoers. The current record-holder? A celebration of Talmud study in 2012 that filled the seats and stands with 93,000 people, most of them Orthodox men. That gathering, called the…

(JTA) — “Look mom, he’s a beautiful butterfly,” a child shouted, pointing at me, as I marched up Fifth Avenue in drag on June 4 at the Celebrate Israel Parade. I could only imagine how meaningful it would have been for me as a kid to see drag included as part of this annual Jewish…

(JTA) — Toronto is home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, nearly half of the 335,000 Jews in Canada. But until last week, the city did not have a dedicated Holocaust museum. The Toronto Holocaust Museum opened its doors on Friday, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by an array of dignitaries and Holocaust…

(JTA) — Amichai Chikli, the Israeli Diaspora minister who has antagonized some liberal segments of American Jewry, called J Street “hostile” to Israel after it retweeted a photo of the minister from New York City’s Celebrate Israel Parade. Chikli was photographed at the June 4 parade making what appeared to many to be an obscene…

(JTA) – Among the many books that conservative parents have recently asked their children’s schools to remove is a lushly illustrated version of the most famous Holocaust diary. The graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 2018, has found itself at the center of a growing number of controversies involving book removals…

LONDON (JTA) — London’s Jewish Museum is to close indefinitely next month and begin hunting for a new home for its collection of 40,000 objects, one of the largest of its kind in Europe. The rising costs of maintaining its current premises in northwest London and a difficult fundraising environment exacerbated an already precarious financial…

(New York Jewish Week) — Some of the greatest talents in Jewish music have strolled Midwood’s lettered avenues, including the klezmer musician Pete Sokolow and the Hasidic composer Ben Zion Shenker. Both have left us — Sokolow in 2022, Shenker in 2016 — but the Modzitzer synagogue on Avenue L, where Shenker once lead prayers, is…