Two prophecies of apocalypse from Eastern Europe eerily bookend our cultural and political unease
On the 30-year anniversary of the Velvet Revolution ending Communism in Czechoslovakia, notes on how to transform a one-party state into a democracy in a matter of weeks
At a summer camp an hour from the banks of the Danube where thousands of their ancestors were shot only seventy years ago, young Jews from all over the world are gathering to celebrate.
Letters to and from the early-20th-century immigration service that sent thousands of Jews to America’s heartland
Making sense of a new Pew study on ‘religious belief and national belonging in Central and Eastern Europe’
The story of Simhah Isaac Lutski helps explain how Karaite Jews retained their communal and doctrinal coherence amid other competing, more ‘European’ forms of Judaism
Jewish graveyards in Eastern Europe are crumbling, neglected, and vandalized. Who will be responsible for protecting them—and their communities’ history?
Performs with B’way star Dudu Fisher for casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, IDF legend E. Lebovitz, former camp inmates
YIVO director of education says the language is still very much alive
Researchers identify 350-person founding population of Ashkenazi Jewry
An explosive debate erupts from footnotes suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews are Europeans
Holocaust revisionism rises in old Jewish strongholds of Vilna, Kovno & Riga
Gary Shteyngart’s new memoir is a touching meditation on the origins, nature, and limits of humor
The steel magnate—son-in-law of the former president and once a symbol of post-Soviet nepotism—now advocates for the rule of law
A visit with Arkady Gendler, the last link to the living roots of Yiddish culture, on the eve of a new album
Blossom director Zane Buzby offers financial support to a group of tragically overlooked Holocaust survivors
A farming town hid a Jewish-born teacher during the Holocaust. I went to dig up what it had buried.
In stories written in Poland and the U.S., the modernist master Isaac Bashevis Singer mined folk tales to convey the 20th century’s essential cruelty