Articles written by Andrew Silow Carroll
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The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way
(JTA) — When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we thought it might be cool to hire a klezmer band. This was during the first wave of the klezmer revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and The Klezmer Conservatory Band were rediscovering th...
Ben Stiller satirizes Adam Sandler's 'Chanukah Song' at Mark Twain Prize ceremony
(JTA) - Ben Stiller offered his own High Holiday alternative to Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song" as his fellow Jewish comedian accepted the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. During an awards...
'Two Israels': What's really behind the judicial reform protests
(JTA) — When Benjamin Netanyahu put his controversial calls for judicial reform on pause three weeks ago, many thought the protesters in Israel and abroad might declare victory and take a break. And yet a week ago Saturday some 200,000 people...
Can a Holocaust documentary have a happy ending? Should it?
(JTA) — Holocaust documentaries tend to sit along a scale from horrific to heartwarming. For every “Night Will Fall,” the rediscovered British film showing gruesome scenes from newly liberated Nazi concentration camps, there is a family-friendl...
Now translated into 49 Jewish languages: the Jewish spring ritual of counting the Omer
(JTA) — There are 49 days between the second night of Passover and the holiday of Shavuot, but who’s counting? Jews the world over, in fact, and in languages familiar and obscure. The daily counting of the Omer is an old ritual being given new l...
Which side are you on: Jewish American or American Jew?
(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to pre...
Abraham Zarem, one of the last surviving Manhattan Project scientists, dies at 106
(JTA) — Abraham Zarem was 28 when he joined the Manhattan Project, the vast U.S. government effort to develop the atom bomb. Engineers like him gathered in secret laboratories in New Mexico, California, New York City and elsewhere to provide the...
Burt Bacharach dies at 94
(JTA) - Songwriter Burt Bacharach, who with his longtime lyricist Hal David turned out a string of hits in the 1960s and '70s - including "Alfie" and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" - died on We...
State lawmakers challenge Yeshiva University's claims to public funds
(New York Jewish Week) — Three state lawmakers are asking if Yeshiva University misrepresented itself as a secular institution in order to qualify for more than $230 million in public funds. Their letter demanding a full accounting from the Modern...
U.N. exhibit remembers when the world turned its back on stateless Jewish refugees
(New York Jewish Week) - In 2017, Deborah Veach went back to Germany, looking for the site of the displaced persons camp where she and her parents had been housed after World War II. They were in...
Book bans, Ukraine and the end of Roe: The year 2022 in Jewish ideas
(JTA) — Jewish eras can be defined by events (the fall of the Second Temple, the Inquisition, the founding of Israel) and by ideas (the rabbinic era, emancipation, post-denominationalism). It’s too early to tell what ideas will define this era,...
How the Lanner case still haunts American Jewry
(JTA) — It’s been over 20 years since my predecessor as editor of the New York Jewish Week, Gary Rosenblatt, first exposed the predations of Rabbi Baruch Lanner. His powerful investigation led Lanner’s bosses at the Orthodox Union to issue a...
The Torah supports me in an argument with my wife that I will never win
(JTA) — For years I worked in an office where, in order to make an outside phone call, you had to dial 9 plus 1 plus your number. At least once a week, the police would show up in the lobby because someone had accidentally dialed 9-1-1. The head...
What is a Jew? Israel's renovated Diaspora museum attempts a three-story answer
JERUSALEM (JTA) — I was on a short visit to Israel last week, and spent time with a friend with whom I have been engaged in a 30-year argument. Elli Wohlgelernter and I met when he was the managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and I was...
The Ukrainian Jew who saved Yiddish music from oblivion
(JTA) - Late last year, months before a Russian missile landed near the Babyn Yar memorial outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, the site's foundation announced plans for a new museum to honor the 33,771 Jews...
'Never Again' is shorthand for – for what, exactly?
(JTA) — Seventy-nine years ago this month, crowds twice filled Madison Square Garden for a pageant, “We Will Never Die,” meant to draw attention to the slaughter of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis. Screenwriter Ben Hecht organized the spectacle...
Charles Entenmann wasn't Jewish. - but Jews saw his cakes and cookies as part of the family
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) - Nothing seemed so Jewish as a box of Entenmann's cake or cookies. "All of the Jews I know bought Entenmann's," wrote Nancy Kalikow Maxwell, in her 2019 book...
Israel's never-ending, and very human, 'Who Is a Jew?' saga
(JTA) — Jared Armstong has an emotional story to tell, and he told it in an oped I edited last week for our opinion section (Heritage ran it last week as an article). Armstrong made headlines recently when the Israeli government refused his...
Fed up with its tenant, a NYC synagogue seeks to replace board of historic Touro Synagogue
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) – The historic New York City synagogue that controls the equally historic Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Is-land moved to terminate the lease of the congregation that worships there. But don’t call it an...
Jewish museums team up to create new tool for researching Holocaust victims
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — In a boon for scholars and amateur researchers, records from Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust authority, are now publicly available through JewishGen, the largest online Jewish genealogy resource of its kind. The...
No one lost their Jewish last name at Ellis Island
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Shortly before he died, my dad gave me a trove of family documents, some dating to the 19th century. For the first time I had confirmation of what our family name was before a great-uncle changed it to Carroll when...
Meet the 27-year-old amplifying the sounds of the Borscht Belt
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) - Growing up, Aaron Bendich would spend lots of time with his grandfather Max in the North Bronx, in a house "filled to the brim" with records, videotapes and CDs....
AOC meets with top NYC Jewish group for first time
(JTA) — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down for a public interview with a top New York City Jewish group, ending what some had considered a snub of Jewish leadership since the progressive New York Democrat’s election in 2019. In her April 1...
What Jewish comedians made of Michael Che's Israel Joke
(JTA) — During this time of Purim, I am busy writing jokes that poke fun at the stuff we do and obsess about as Jews without offending too many people. Not always easy, and that’s when I am writing for an audience that I know extremely well....
Clemency for more than a dozen Jews
(JTA) — In the final hours of his presidency, Donald Trump awarded clemency to more than a dozen Jews who had been convicted of crimes — but not Sheldon Silver, the disgraced former New York State Assembly speaker. Silver was not on the list of...
