Intermountain Jewish News

Culture

I.J. Singer’s dispatches for the Yiddish Forward are collected in Viaggi in America (Travels in America), which was recently published in a new Italian translation. (Giuntina; Wikimedia Commons)
Culture

I.J. Singer is part of Italy’s Yiddish moment

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.

JTA
John Galliano and Anna Wintour pictured in 2021; in the background are Galliano-designed gowns on exhibit at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. (Getty Images)
Culture

Met honors Galliano — did the designer do teshuvah?

Before the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it would honor fashion designer John Galliano with a major Costume Institute exhibition next spring, the museum convened at least two unusual meetings: a face-to-face with Galliano and a number of prominent rabbis, and a larger meeting with the recently retired Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, museum officials and several prominent Jewish leaders.

Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTA
French DJ and artistic director Barbara Butch poses during a photo session in Paris on March 5, 2026. (Joel Saget / AFP via Getty Images)
Culture

French-Jewish DJ Barbara Butch stands strong

The popular French Jewish DJ Barbara Butch is striking a defiant tone after pro-Palestinian activists disrupted her concert in Grenoble, France, vowing not to be cowed from performing.

JTA
Kosher chef Sruly Meyer knows how to handle the fire on ‘100 Cooks’ on the Food Network. (Food Network via JNS)
Culture

Sruly Meyer handles the fire on ‘100 Cooks’

Watching television in his home in Hollywood, Calif. — a fan of “Chopped!” and “Beat Bobby Flay”— Sruly Meyer dreamed of being on the Food Network. With word that a new show called “100 Cooks” was being cast, producers contacted him, saying they were impressed with his Instagram posts. 100 home chefs in America enter an arena, where they are randomly selected to compete against each other to win $100,000.

JNS
‘Son of Saul’ was directed by László Nemes.
Culture

‘Son of Saul’ director: ‘Jews shunned in cinema’

The director of “Son of Saul”, the Holocaust movie that won the Oscar award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2016, said that the movie would’ve been ignored in today’s “shameless orgy of anti-Semitism.”

Shana Goldberg
Moe’s Broadway Bagel General Manager Steve Pagnotta with the popular sesame and Italian varieties of bagels. (Steve Mark)
Business

Moe’s Broadway Bagel is a family affair

The workday begins at 5:30 a.m. It is now late morning on a snowy day in Boulder, and Steve Pagnotta still has an energetic bounce in his step. “I’m the late guy,” Pagnotta laughs, “but we are baking around the clock.” Pagnotta is general manager of Moe’s Broadway Bagel

Steve Mark
Tamara Gorni and her husband, Michael Gorni, perform a Jewish wedding ceremony in Kiev, Ukraine, on May 6, 2026. (Courtesy JCC Beit Menachem)
Culture

Five couples wed in wartime ceremony in Kiev

Five Jewish couples got married earlier this month at a synagogue in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, in what a local rabbi said was Ukrainian Jewry’s largest group wedding ceremony in years.

JNS
‘Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory’ is a new graphic novel by Barbara Yelin.
Culture

New graphic novel offers insights into lives of Holocaust survivors

The theme of this latest entry into the growing and increasingly respected field of graphic novels about the Holocaust is amply expressed by the pair of nouns in the book’s title: color and memory. It was released in time for Yom HaShoah last month.

Steve Lipman
‘For Whom My Soul Sings,’ acrylic and mixed media on paperboard, by Penny Nisson, inspired by Shir Ha-Shirim — Song of Songs.
Culture

Penny prays with a paintbrush

When Penny Nisson is in synagogue, she prays with the words in the siddur and the melodies of the liturgy. When she is in her art studio, she prays with her paintbrush. Nisson is a spiritual person who loves and lives Judaism. She and her husband Perry incorporate Jewish ritual into their home and they are regulars at East Denver Orthodox Synagogue. Penny Nissan sits in the front at shul, reading, reciting and hearing the words of prayer.

Larry Hankin
Mierle Laderman Ukeles speaks with a sanitation worker in an archival photo. (Courtesy Toby Perl Freilich)
Culture

Documentary about ‘Maintenance Artist,’ Denver native Mierle Laderman Ukeles

In 1976, deep in New York City’s fiscal crisis, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles read a review of her conceptual work in the Village Voice. In his review, critic David Bourdon made a radical suggestion inspired by Ukeles’ thesis: What if municipal work, like the Sanitation Department, were conceptual art? Could it get funded by grants, instead of by the city?

Jackie Hajdenberg, JTA