Adam Mansbach is, and possibly always will be, best known as the “Go the Fuck to Sleep” guy. But he is a more protean and prolific — and profoundly Jewish — writer than people may know.
Stories in J. The Jewish News of Northern California
In season 2 of ‘Dave,’ a Jewish rapper struggles to not get canceled
The new season begins with the same question at the center of the season 1 finale: Is Burd a “culture vulture,” someone guilty of cultural appropriation?
After abandoning Instagram in disgust, @MichaelChabon is speaking his mind on Twitter
On Aug. 3, @michaelchabon tweeted the following to his 16,000 followers: “Remember carob? What was that all about?”
‘We are not alone!’ How a new study validates the feelings of many Jews of color
For the first time, Jews of color have a robust, easily accessible and parsable data set that reveals what many have known for generations.
‘Juneteenth sameach’: Local Jews mark newest national holiday with prayer and reflection
This year’s focus on Juneteenth carried even more resonance following President Joe Biden’s signing of a bill on June 17 making it the newest federal holiday.
Outdoor Israeli dancing attracts young and old, Jewish and non-Jewish
Aaron Alpert, an American Jew from Los Angeles, and Latishya Steele, an African American non-Jew from Brooklyn, make a perhaps unlikely Israeli folk dance teaching duo. Neither is Israeli or speaks Hebrew. But both are extremely passionate about Israeli dance.
Israel’s new call to deport African Hebrew Israelites reopens old wounds
In the late 1970s, Israel formed a Knesset committee to investigate the “Black Hebrews cult,” a community of non-Jewish African Americans who had been entering the country on tourist visas and settling illegally in the Negev Desert for almost a decade.
Highly anticipated Philip Roth biography delivers the goods
Through meticulous research, including interviews with Roth’s confidants, former flames and enemies, Blake Bailey reveals a fiercely ambitious, funny and obsessive man who put his commitment to “words, words, words” — one of his mantras — above everything and everyone else.
Our Pandemic Year: Artists faced a choice — pivot or perish
For so many Bay Area artists, the pandemic has brought with it numerous personal and professional challenges, from lost gigs (and therefore lost income) to feeling lost creatively. But it has also opened up new opportunities for collaborating, teaching and performing online, and it has allowed many to reach wider audiences than they normally might thanks to the internet.
Why some right-leaning Jews are leaving California for redder pastures
For many conservatives, the turbulence of 2020 — marked by what they consider draconian stay-at-home orders, violent social justice protests amid reckless calls to “defund the police” and another devastating wildfire season, on top of a growing homelessness crisis — reinforced their belief that California is beset by numerous systemic problems, and that its political leaders are either doing nothing to solve them or actively making them worse.