Tablet Magazine doesn’t often focus on Heidi Klum—she hasn’t renamed herself Miriam to join the celeb Kabbalah crew or made her position known on the prompt shuttering of Brighton Beach Memoirs. But a blogger at the Forward has overcome that problem, observing today that in Klum’s role as Project Runway host, she relishes announcing the ...

In its forthcoming issue, Moment magazine offers an instructive history of conversion to Judaism followed by first person accounts of what made some folks do it. The narratives are fairly straightforward, save the occasional observation from the province of the improbable. Former Mormon Karen Nielson-Anson speculates that playing Fruma Sarah in Fiddler on the Roof ...

President Barack Obama will address the annual General Assembly meeting of the United Jewish Communities and Jewish Federations next month in Washington, D.C., the UJC announced this morning. It will be his first speech as president to a broad audience of Jewish leaders. “The speech comes as many American Jews and Israelis have been encouraging ...

Philip Roth’s 30th novel, The Humbling, was published this week, and it has prompted the author to sit for a rare interview. Tina Brown does the gushing video interrogation for the Daily Beast, asking Roth for his views on the future of the novel (what with Kindle and television, he gives the printed book no ...

The L.A. Jewish Journalgets a jump on the movie Skin, opening next week, with a profile of Sophie Okonedo, who stars with Sam Neill in the film about a biracial South African born to white parents in the 1950s. (The family had a black forbear of whom they were unaware.) The thorny questions of identity ...

Members of the Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox sect known for its ongoing opposition to Israel’s statehood, have publicly objected to the potential rescue of Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier captured three and a half years ago by Hamas. The group says Shalit’s acknowledgment in a video last month that he ate in a Druze restaurant ...

It’s not often that a rabbi steps in to resolve a disagreement on a professional basketball court, but that’s what happened yesterday at Madison Square Garden, when the New York Knicks played an exhibition game against Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv, with proceeds to benefit an Israeli charity for children. Pini Gershon, Maccabi’s coach, approached the ...

This year’s heavy weight title for world’s biggest deli champion (Oh, you didn’t hear about that award? You’ve really got to get out more!) goes unquestionably to David Sax, whose book Save the Deli hits stores next week. It gets a boost in today’s Wall Street Journal from Dara Horn who posits that “the history ...

Offiicials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum are trying to make it a little easier to never forget. They launched a Facebook page yesterday, which follows a YouTube channel earlier this year. “If our mission is to educate the younger generation to be responsible in the contemporary world, what better tool can we use to reach them ...

Sarah Silverman released a new video over the weekend in which she proposes that the pope sell the Vatican in order to make enough dough to end world hunger. “You preach to live humbly, and I totally agree,” she says, addressing the pontiff in her typical faux-coy manner. “So now maybe it’s time to move ...