Billy Bragg, post-punk troubadour of protest songs and paeans to the working class, took to the stage at Town Hall last week and, almost instantly, danced on Margaret Thatcher's grave. An audience filled largely with Americans who never voted for Ronald Reagan didn't seem offended at all.

So fitting that...

The great Jewish-American novelist, Chaim Potok, who died over a decade ago, may have been the first multicultural artist of any serious note. The Chosen, his best known book, has become almost as ubiquitous on high school readings lists as The Catcher in the Rye or The Adventures...

Jesse Eisenberg, the Academy Award-nominated actor (The Social Network) who has cornered the market on playing complicated, socially awkward young men with chips on their shoulders and bite on their tongues, appears Off-Broadway in The Revisionist, a play he wrote and in which he co-stars at the Cherry...

For most people around the world, Grand Central Terminal is not so much a train station as a metaphor for directionless mayhem, traffic run amuck, bodies barely dodging one another -- only a miracle can divert a head-on collision of either man or machine.

Of course, Grand Central Terminal is...

The 22nd Annual New York Jewish Film Festival runs through January 24, 2013 at the Walter Reade Theater, offering yet another dazzling year of short films, features and documentaries -- 45 films from nine countries -- that capture the breadth of the Jewish experience from around the world.

The crickets of Central Park are alive with the sound of Sondheim.

With all the world's eyes presently cast on the track and fields of London, New York City theatergoers have their own Olympic treat awaiting then inside a lush and luminous forest at the Delacorte Theater. In celebration...

At a time when everyone laments America's declining status as educator of its children -- its ranking among world nations slipping with each yearly study -- and with no solutions in sight for broken school systems all across the country, the resignation of Stuyvesant High School Principal Stanley Teitel is...

The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center kicked off the 21st annual New York Jewish Film Festival at the Film Society's Walter Reade Theater and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center on January 11, 2012, with screenings that run through January 26. The festival...

Days after the Casey Anthony verdict, the drumbeat against America's jury system has swelled to an angry Greek chorus: "What were the jurors thinking--the mother partied for a whole month when her daughter was presumably missing?"

Many of these same confounded citizens also threw up their hands with the...

With the assassination of an unarmed Osama bin Laden and questions arising whether he should have been abducted and brought to the United States to stand trial, the distinctions between justice and revenge once more confuse and confound the law abiding.

Fifty years ago Israel's spy network kidnapped Hitler's most...

Sidney Lumet died this past weekend. By now, with news cycles spinning like centrifuges, Lumet's death will soon be old news. That would be a shame. This is one of those losses that should linger for a little while longer, and surely not be forgotten.

This is actually my second...

Passover arrived early in Egypt. The modern day Egyptians didn't wait for a Prince of Egypt to liberate them from President Hosni Mubarak. Who needs Moses when there's social media? Without plagues or the parting of the Red Sea, Mubarak finally just let his people go.

Actually, weeks after...

Oscar nominations were announced this week and the biggest surprise was the Academy's lavish support for True Grit, the Coen brothers' remake of the 1970 film, which itself was an adaptation from a Charles Portis novel.

True Grit received ten nominations, including one for best picture, best director, and...

More treasured than baseball and apple pie, more admired than George Washington and even the winners of American Idol, America's greatest love may be the First Amendment. Among all the amendments to the Constitution, it is by far the best known. And despite its relative brevity, it seems to embody...

The AVP NIVEA Tour (pro beach volleyball) comes to Belmar, New Jersey this weekend with qualifying matches beginning on Friday leading up to Sunday's men's and women's final.

Professional volleyball is one of the most fan-friendly and entertaining sports in America. There's the beach and the bodies...

One thing is undeniably true about the law: It's better to be a spectator than a participant. There are few winners in courtrooms, even among those who win. The losers, of course, are forever lost. At least those who merely watch end up being entertained if not forewarned about the...

President Obama is the first American president to host a Passover Seder in the White House--second year in a row, third overall (the first was held in a hotel during the presidential campaign).

If symbolism was all that mattered to American Jews, then the president's annual observance of the...

Broadway ironies abound at the Duke on 42nd Street, where Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, presented by the Theatre for a New Audience, is playing until March 14.

One of its stars, Elisabeth Waterston, is truly splendid in the role of Isabella, who, like Portia in The Merchant of Venice, makes...

Never before has so much depended on the success of a 10" LED backlit screen. With the economy in shambles and the media a mess, newspapers, magazines and book publishers are suddenly forced to look to Steven Jobs to save their jobs. No longer just Silicon Valley's best-known visionary, Jobs...

On Christmas Eve, a New Jersey resident with a Jewish surname, David Goldman, was finally reunited with his 9-year-old son, Sean, who had been living in Brazil for the past five years, the object of a grotesque custody battle that would have made even Franz Kafka cringe.

In 2004, Sean,...