Culture

In 2015, while visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, James Beard Award-winning chef Alon Shaya came face-to-face with a WW II artifact that moved him deeply.It was a red cloth triangle — cut from a Nazi flag — embroidered with the names of a few dozen female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story is Evan Gershkovich’s memoir of his arrest, 16 months behind bars and release from a Russian prison.

The Netherlands will return to the Eurovision Song Contest, overriding a broadcaster that withdrew over Israel’s actions in Gaza. The Dutch organization that oversees public broadcasting, the Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, said on Sept. 23 that it will take over the country’s entry to Eurovision after Avrotros pulled out of the 2027 event in Burgas, Bulgaria.

The fifth season of the Israeli action-thriller “Fauda” ranked first among Netflix shows in Lebanon during the week of Sept. 7-13, according to the subscription-based streaming service’s Tudum country rankings for the period.

Yom Kippur break-the-fast has ballooned into a significant event in the Jewish calendar. Though menus have become more extravagant, for many Ashkenazi Jews, the heart of the meal are the classics — bagels, smoked fish, blintzes and cake.

A Dutch journalist hunting for art treasures belonging to an Amsterdam Jewish art dealer spent years trying to get answers from Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of the Nazi financier who had made off with some of them, with no luck. So last year he went to her house in Mar del Plata, a resort city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.

336,004,951. That number summarizes the main accomplishment of Dolly Parton, the beloved country singer who died last month as an enormously wealthy woman. It is the number of books distributed for free, to children in the US and in four foreign countries, as of this month, by the early-childhood literacy intervention program she founded 31 years ago.

John Galliano withdrew from a planned exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in response to an escalating controversy over the museum’s decision to honor the fashion designer despite his history of anti-Semitic and racist remarks.

In 1932, Israel Joshua Singer boarded a ship bound for New York, where he had been invited to report on the US for Yiddish-speaking Jews like himself. “Americans are a difficult people to understand,” the famed novelist wrote in one of his first articles from the US. Nearly a century later, his first encounters with America have appeared together in Italian translation.

Jewish musician Mikey Pauker is appealing a federal court ruling that dismissed his discrimination lawsuit after a California retreat center canceled his scheduled Chanukah concert due to his support for Israel.