Jackie Hajdenberg, JTA

An only-in-New York tale of serendipity and Jewish geography: Mazel Tofu is a collective of Jewish Mandarin speakers that formed two years ago. A Chabad Purim party in 2024 brought together three men with mutual friends and the vague knowledge that the other shared their affinity for Chinese: Jacob Scheer, a media relations associate at Chabad; Ben Weinstein, a teacher at SAR High School, an Orthodox day school; and Mr. Shlumpadink, the stage name of an accordion player who performs folk songs in Yiddish, Chinese and Japanese. Soon, they were speaking in Chinese.

A new exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York chronicles the long history of American anti-Semitism before and after Pittsburgh, from the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jew who was wrongly convicted of murder, to the firebombing last June at a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colo., where at least seven people were injured and one later died.

A forthcoming scripted TV show about Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel is getting a product tie-in aimed at igniting appetites among fans of the famed Borscht Belt retreat.

An Orthodox Jewish music festival will take place in Bethel, NY in August — at the very same location where the Woodstock Music & Art Fair took place in August, 1969. Called Yamim Ba’im, or “The Coming Days,” the four-act, family-friendly outdoor concert will occur at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts on Thursday, Aug. 7.

Seven treasures from the YIVO (“Yiddish Scientific Institute”) — now marking its 100th anniversary — tell the story of the Jewish people, from a Polish Chanukah menorah to a letter from Sigmund Freud.