Good Monday morning, New York. Join the Jewish Week and UJA-Federation tonight, 6:00 p.m. ET, for a conversation with writer Dara Horn — author of the new essay collection, “People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present” — and Abraham Foxman, national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League. They’ll discuss Jewish memory, history, identity and antisemitism. Register here.
INDICTED: A grand jury Friday indicted a 30-year-old man on 76 counts of criminal mischief and hate crimes for a vandalism spree that targeted four synagogues in Riverdale in April. (Riverdale Press)
- Jordan Burnette, himself of Riverdale, is not due back in court until next January.
SOMETHING NEW: Novelist Gary Shteyngart’s New Yorker article about his botched circumcision offers something new in the debate over the practice: a non-polemical personal account that raises uncomfortable questions for rabbis and mohels.
- The Jewish Week’s Andrew Silow-Carroll discusses how a changing Jewish community may seize on arguments like Shteyngart’s.
- ICYMI: JTA reports on a new support group for Jewish parents who are resisting circumcision.
CALL COMFORT: New Yorker Rita Plush lost her son to a terrible illness, but found solace in her weekly phone chats with a homebound elderly woman. (Kveller)
- The calls with the 93-year-old were arranged by the Queens Community House. “Stepping outside my own life into Sara’s has somehow filled part of that space my son once occupied,” Plush writes.
LOOT: Reviews are split over the new exhibit at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum, “Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art.”
- The Guardian calls the show, featuring masterworks recovered from the Nazis, “remarkable”: “Rarely does one walk away from a gallery with a spinning head, thinking of the life led by the paintings, drawings and objects themselves,” writes Jordan Hoffman.
- But a New York Times reviewer called it “imprecise about its subject, and sometimes outright careless about the Jewish lives it supposedly reintroduces.”
- Your Jewish Week correspondent found the exhibit moving and informative, but wished it revealed more about the bitter legal fights waged by museums and auction houses over restituting looted artworks to their rightful owners.
AROUND THE JEWISH WORLD, WITH JTA
- Joshua Angrist, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with dual Israeli-American citizenship, was named one of three winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics.
- Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who stepped down Saturday amid a corruption probe, made support of Israel and the fight against antisemitism key policy issues.
- In an interview with Axios, the real Ben and Jerry said the decision to halt sales in the West Bank did not constitute a boycott.
IN THEATERS
“Golden Voices,” an Israeli comedy about Russian film dubbers at sea in their new country, is showing this week at Quad Cinemas in Greenwich Village.
- Andrew Lapin calls it “a unique immigrant story that taps into a rich vein of dramatic potential.” (JTA)
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Join My Jewish Learning for a siyyum, or celebration, for those completing Tractate Beitzah in the daily Daf Yomi Talmud study cycle. Led by Rabbi Asher Lopatin, Rabbanit Dasi Fruchter and Rabbi Avi Strausberg. 2:00 p.m.
Diving into scholarship from her most recent book, “The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets,” journalist Janine di Giovanni discusses the plight and possible extinction of Christian communities across Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine after 2,000 years of inhabiting these lands. $20. Buy tickets here for this 92Y event. 7:00 p.m.
Photo, top: “Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art,” an exhibition about art and cultural property stolen by the Nazi, runs at the Jewish Museum through Jan. 9, 2022. (Jewish Week)
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