In September 1932, Israel Joshua Singer boarded a ship bound for New York, where he had been invited to report on the United States 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 U.S. “They have tried at all costs to be, in every aspect, the opposite of Europeans.”
In a series of articles commissioned by Abraham Cahan, the famed editor of the Yiddish Forverts, Singer sought to help his readers understand this mirror world. On the eve of the Nazis’ rise in Europe, he marveled at the landscapes, the Jewish strivers and dreamers and the Christians who lent a sympathetic ear to the challenges facing Jews back home.
Nearly a century later, Singer’s astonished first encounters with America have appeared together in translation for the first time — not in English, but in Italian. “Viaggi in America” (Travels in America), published by the historic Italian Jewish publishing house Giuntina and translated from Yiddish by Enrico Benella, brings together I.J. Singer’s witty American dispatches for the Forverts.
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Organizers of Rome’s annual Pride parade have barred Italy’s only Jewish LGBTQIA+ organization from marching with a float at this year’s June 20 parade, although they are still allowed to participate in the march itself.
In a statement that came out Monday, Roma Pride said Keshet Italia had failed to endorse its political manifesto, which characterized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide. It also accused the organization of making an “unacceptable lexical distinction,” by refusing to use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
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As Zohran Mamdani leads in the polls, his unprecedented candidacy is testing the city’s long-standing political and cultural ties with its Jewish community and the State of Israel.
NEW YORK — With just weeks to go before election day, New York’s mayoral race remains unpredictable. One thing, however, is clear: it’s been unlike any in the city’s modern history. If frontrunner Zohran Mamdani wins on November 4, it would mark an extraordinary shift in New York City’s Jewish history. He would be the city’s first anti-Israel mayor, the first without close ties to the city’s large and diverse Jewish population, and the first in decades to face accusations of peddling antisemitism—or, at the very least, of failing to forcefully denounce it.
