kveller

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Where do you shop for a Jewish summer camp wardrobe? If you’re costume designer Ava Hama and dressing the cast of Jewish summer camp movie “The Floaters,” you’re shopping everywhere from J. Crew to the bulk bins of vintage warehouses — and you’re absolutely nailing the look.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... It’s shaping up to be a pretty, pretty hot July — which means staying home in front of the TV may be just what the doctor ordered. Luckily, there are a lot of fun Jewish stars and shows to watch and schvitz to, from “Love Island USA,” which this season features a Jewish Gal, to Larry David’s “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” where every sketch is full of kvetchy Jewish energy.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Antisemitism is having a moment, and I have no idea what to do about it, so I took my children to a food festival called The Great Nosh. My daughter is 7 and my son is 4. They know they are Jewish the way they know they are New Yorkers: It’s just a fact, unremarkable and obvious. I want to keep it that way for as long as I can, as they are blissfully unaware of the rise in casual antisemitism. I’d love for their Judaism to mean something to them.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... James Gray’s 2022 “Armageddon Times” was based on the director’s Jewish childhood in 1980s Queens, New York. It’s the story of his early teenage friendship with a Black classmate and his relationship with his Jewish grandfather (played by Anthony Hopkins), who escaped antisemitic persecution in the former USSR. The film featured Anne Hathaway as Jewish mom Esther Graff, a stand-in for Gray’s own mother. Esther was a complex Jewish mother figure.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... This past Sunday, I attended Kveller’s Jewish Mah Jongg Festival at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. Even though I don’t live in the Big Apple, I had never been to the museum, and I didn’t yet know the vast majority of people at the event, I felt like I was coming home.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... If you’ve ever wished a newly pregnant Jewish friend a “mazel tov” or hearty “congratulations!!” and were met with some awkwardness, you should know, it’s not personal. While this isn’t true about every Jewish pregnant person, many Jews don’t believe in wishing someone “mazel tov” — the Hebrew for “congratulations” which literally means “good luck” or “good constellations” — when one gets pregnant.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... I’m not going to lie. I, like so many TV streamers, am a huge fan of the Harlan Coben Netflix industrial complex. He’s the Jewish writer behind so many of the best thrillers (on the page and on television) and his latest offering, “I Will Find You,” starring Britt Lower and Sam Worthington, is now one of the top 10 most-watched shows on Netflix. If there’s a new Harlan Coben TV show — and there always seems to be — I’m going to watch it.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Yaacov Agam’s kinetic art always made you stop and stare. And then move and stare. And then walk back and forth, noting how it changed with every angle. His work engaged the viewer in an intimate and joyous dance. Every meeting with it, whether the iconic panels of saturated colors were at a museum or in a city square, was wonderfully immersive, spiritual and celebratory.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Babycenter — the website whose data accurately predicted that Eliana would enter the top ten baby names for girls in 2025 — is noticing a new trend: Parents are giving their babies names from Y2K-era TV shows.Cited in Babycenter’s theory: Troy and Gabriella are both up (from “High School Musical”), and so are Callie, Derek, Miranda and Arizona (from “Grey’s Anatomy”).

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... In 1988, Meir Shalev published his first novel, “The Blue Mountain.” It was a book that, along with his future novels, would help cement the journalist and writer as one of the greatest Israeli authors of all time. Shalev was born in the Jezreel Valley, and it is the setting of his many romantic historical novels. He died there, too, in 2023.