Hanukkah News

Adventures on the Santa Train by Rob Simbeck Santa Claus is standing on the back of a train stopped somewhere in southeastern Kentucky, throwing toys and candy to the screaming throng below.

Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company will open its 15th anniversary season on October 24, 2009.

The sparkling glass walls of the new Derfner Judaica Museum look out across the Hudson River by way of a sculpture garden on a rolling green lawn.

Children and adults perform at Temple Ner Tamid's Hanukka celebration last year.

Last Christmas, a group of very lapsed Jews gathered around a table of very treyf Chinese food - in China, for good measure.

In the midst of tragedy and horror, art and music give voice and form to joy and beauty.

It's a few months too early for Hanukka, but Jerusalem is going to be celebrating a festival of lights anyway.

If, as the great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches, Shabbat, or the Sabbath, is a cathedral of time, a window of holiness at week's end, then this museum-quality cast-bronze Shabbat collection -- candlesticks, wine cup, spice box, all on a platter -- surely would be the one we'd raise up at its altar.

Last year Golden City Council rejected a request to display a Menorah on city property in favor of waiting another year to devise a cohesive policy for religious symbols on city land.

The Los Angeles Film Festival runs from June 18th -28th, 2009. Celebrating its fifteenth year, the festival will showcase various U.S. and foreign films, many are world premieres.

So I was pedaling along on my bicycle, towing a little kiddie trailer that contained my daughter, Sophie, and her friend Sofia.

The Supreme Court has always been a highly symbolic court, and that symbolism was on fine display when President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the first vacant high court seat of his new administration.

What do a menorah, unleavened bread, a ram's horn and a tent have in common? Each item is associated with four of Judaism's holidays - Hanukkah, Passover, Rosh Hashana and Sukkot.

Q: My brother's daughter, my niece and godchild, will be married in 6 weeks in a Tridentine Latin Mass.

Harcourt 400 pp.; $34.95 Fans of the great Israeli writer will recognize familiar terrain from The Liberated Bride - the confident, controlling, ageing male and his attractive, opinionated, sex-rationing mate.

Mitzvah Tank The Mitzvah Tank crew on Tverskaya Ulitsa. The project eventually hopes to have tanks in other Russian cities too.

Dan Kennedy notes David Geffen's interest in taking over the Times and turning it into a non-profit or something.

While potato latkes and sufganiyot - homemade jelly donuts - are among the classic Hanukkah foods, "anything made in oil" is an appropriate food for Jewish families to serve at celebrations, according to Meira Saks, wife of Rabbi Moshe Saks of Congregation B'nai Israel.

Long before blogs and Web postings led to the rise of citizen journalism, Judy Denison and her pool of e-mail addresses could rally 50 people to a party within an hour.

Ben Silverstone, Martine McCutcheon and Stephanie Powers, Tribute to Patrick Swayze.