The building that once housed Anshe Kanesses, one of the grandest synagogues in ‘Chicago’s Jerusalem,’ faces the wrecking ball after 99 years

Patti Stanger, host of the Bravo reality show Millionaire Matchmaker, is the iconic antidote to the bloated expectations and self-delusion of our times

David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, an assault on liberal values and politics, should be viewed not as a polemic but as a yet-to-be-written play about his usual subjects: scams and hustlers

Alan Cumming’s character on The Good Wife—the marvelously nuanced political operative Eli Gold—captures the future face of careful, largely deracinated Jewish-American politicians

Though officially an exercise in change and progress, Rahm Emanuel’s inauguration as Chicago’s first Jewish mayor was nonetheless steeped in well-worn myths and traditions

Sigrid Nunez’s memoir of Susan Sontag in the 1970s shows the polarizing thinker in a rarely seen light—as mentor, hero, and muse

Julian Schnabel’s Miral, a sympathetic portrayal of four Palestinian women over nearly 50 years, is neither what its defenders claim nor what its detractors allege. It is a collection of fragments that ultimately doesn’t hold together.

Rahm Emanuel, who will become the first Jewish mayor of Chicago, shied away from discussing his religion during the campaign, but he couldn’t escape Jewish exceptionalism

In Compulsion, now at New York’s Public Theater, Mandy Patinkin portrays a writer whose obsession with Anne Frank drives him to the brink of madness

As Rahm Emanuel’s campaign for mayor of Chicago heads toward victory, he’s sending different messages—not a Boss, gay-friendly, disciplined, even rabbinical—to different audiences

After his successful response to a massive snow storm helped burnish Rahm Emanuel’s candidacy for Chicago mayor, the local press is trying to find ‘Bad Rahm’ hidden inside the new, well-mannered version

After the Illinois Supreme Court put Rahm Emanuel back on the Chicago mayoral ballot, all he has left to do is win

Rahm Emanuel, in the midst of a rough-and-tumble campaign, was just denied a spot on the mayoral ballot. Was the move Chicago politics as usual, or has Emanuel’s Judaism come into play?

How Goliath became David (for a day)