In the 1990s a guide hired by the Spanish tourist office took me to the last standing synagogue in the Spanish city of Segovia, which is now the Church of Corpus Christi, the home to an order of cloistered Franciscan nuns. Although the main gallery had been heavily restored after a fire in 1899, the ...

Isaac Sutton’s home, which he shares with his wife and three children in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, is a whimsical overlap of the natural world and artistic enterprise. In his cozy, carpeted living room, glass sculptures, vases, and lamps from different eras are grouped into clusters of greens, reds, and blues; his dining room ...

After years of protests and an unsuccessful legal challenge, architect Frank Gehry has pulled out of a project to build a Jerusalem counterpart to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance that is slated to stand on a site that was once part of an ancient Muslim cemetery.
“We are no longer involved in it,” said ...

For many immigrants and their children in the era of mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, the ubiquitous Yiddish accent was a source of shame and a barrier to upward mobility. For the cartoonist and animator Milt Gross, that accent was the funniest thing he had ever heard.
In his cartoons, Gross, born in 1895 to ...

The bathroom wall of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel’s rent-stabilized apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where they’ve lived since 1963, happens to have been decorated years ago with a pencil drawing by the artist Sol LeWitt. Another piece of his—a black wooden floor structure—sat in the living room, next to works by superstars like Chuck ...

The old brick synagogue on Orchard Street in New Haven, Connecticut is disintegrating. In the decade or so that the 60-odd families who make up Congregation Beth Israel have been trying to raise the $1.5 million it will cost to renovate the once-thriving Orthodox shul—or even the $300,000 it will take to make the most ...

London-based photographer Frederic Aranda began taking pictures of Hasidim more or less by accident. While studying at Oxford and looking for a place to live, he stumbled across a house owned by a Lubavitcher rabbi. Aranda set up a studio in the house’s attic and started taking portraits of the rabbi’s family. Word spread and ...