Arts & Culture

Pioneering comedian and free-speech warrior Lenny Bruce (Leonard Alfred Schneider) died on this date in 1966 at age 40 from a drug overdose. In the early 1950s he worked a double-act with his wife,...

IN THE 1960s musicians broke through the invisible barrier of the three-minute pop song. The single that did it, which rose to number 2, in fact, was Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965). Its six minutes...

Goldie Hawn, whose arc in show business paralleled the arc of feminist empowerment in the 1970s, was born in Washington, DC on this date in 1945. Hawn played a giggling “dumb blonde” bikini girl...

Leo Rosten, the author of The Joys of Yiddish and numerous other popular, witty and erudite books, died on this date in 1997 in New York City at age 88. Rosten earned a doctorate in political...

Actress Natalie Portman had a great reason for missing last Sunday’s Oscars ceremony. She gave birth to her second child last week — a girl named Amalia — but kept the new arrival quiet in...

It was SRO, standing-room only—an amazing turnout. Young and old, locals and tourists, poured into the venue as part of my travels “back home.” They came, anxious to listen to my book talk and...

Walking toward the Ziggurat of Ur, a massive Sumerian temple dedicated to the moon god Nannar, tourists often can't help but express their awe. Representative of their excitement is one visitor who remarked, “It’s incredible! I studied it...

When thinking about Jewish communities around the world, most of us probably don’t give much thought to Uganda. But tucked away in the Savannah, over very rough roads, live the Abayudaya. Like the rest of...

On January 28, 1887, Arthur Rubinstein, one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, was born in Poland. The artist performed at an early age with Joseph Joachim in Berlin and in his...

The city of Dimona in the south of Israel is in the “advanced stages” of planning a Disneyland-like theme park, The Jerusalem Post reported. Pla’im (Hebrew for ‘wonders’), or “Park of Wonders,” is slated to have a similar...