During the NBA playoffs, people were beginning to notice that the uniforms worn by the Dallas Mavericks seem not to say “Mavs,” rendered in all caps, but “Maus,” the title of Art Spiegelman’s 1986 bestseller, a graphic novel about the Holocaust.

Louis Keene, a staff reporter at The Forward, covering religion, sports and the West Coast, decided to call Art Spiegelman to see what he thought of the Mavs/Maus mixup. “That’s funny,” Spiegelman said. “I haven’t seen it, but I have no thoughts about sports at all. I couldn’t recite back to you what sports you were talking about.

As an afterthought, he asked, “Is there another team with cats playing?”

The German government has agreed to allocate $1.5 billion in Holocaust reparations this year, setting a new record for how much the country is spending to support survivors.

The increase from a total of $1.4 billion last year is due to a rise in the amount the government is paying to reimburse survivors’ medical expenses. But the sum paid directly to survivors has once again declined, reflecting the accelerating deaths of survivors. And the growth in the total package is expected to end soon as the number of living survivors plummets, according to the conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, known as the Claims Conference, the group that negotiates reparations with the German government. The group has calculated that about 245,000 are still alive, with the median age of 85.

The $1.5 billion set aside this year is broken into three categories: $500 million in direct reparations, a decrease from last year; $972 million to support the care needs of an increasingly elderly cohort of survivors; and $40 million for Holocaust education.

In a bittersweet ceremony held on Sunday, June 23, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh broke ground for a memorial and a new Tree of Life building. The synagogue was the scene of a mass shooting on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman opened fire and killed 11 worshippers.

The building will house a sanctuary for the Tree of Life congregation — one of three congregations that were meeting at the synagogue at the time of the shooting — also an education center dedicated to combating bigotry, and a museum chronicling the long history of antisemitism in America.

The museum will be the first in the United States dedicated exclusively to the history of antisemitism in America, from colonial days through the hard-line anti-immigration  politics of the mid-20th century to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, VA, in 2017.

In a star-studded Tony Awards night, Jewish winners claimed many of the statues:

• Shaina Taub won for best book of a musical and best score for her musical “Stuffs.”
• Alex Edelman won a special Tony for his show, “Just For Us,” in which he chronicles his infiltration into a neo-Nazi meeting.
• Winners for directing included Danya Taymor, niece of Julie Taymor, for “The Outsiders,” and Daniel Aukin, son of directors David Aukin and Nancy Meekler for “Stereophonic.”
• David Adjmi won the Tony for best play, “Stereophonic.”
• Daniel Radcliff won best performance by an actor in a featured role for playing Charlie Kringus in “Merrily We Roll Along.”
• Jonathan Tunik won for orchestrations of “Merrily We Roll Along.”
• Maria Friedman, director, and her sister Sonia Friedman, producer, won Tonys for best revival of a musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.”

In a landmark ruling this month, Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled unanimously that the government must draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the military, that no longer is there any legal framework to continue the decades-long practice to grant them blanket exemption from army service, The Times of Israel reported. The justices made clear they were not telling the state how many Haredi yeshiva students to draft or how quickly, indicating that the process could be gradual. But they warned the government that it must begin now.

The High Court’s decision means that after decades of political and societal controversy over the issue, there is now a legal obligation for young Haredi men to join their Jewish Israeli comrades and serve in the military.

This new reality has come about largely due to the confluence of two major events: The expiration of the original law allowing for blanket service exemptions, and the cataclysmic Oct. 7 Hamas attack and its aftermath, which threw into sharp relief the IDF’s need for more manpower. Currently, an estimated 63,000 Haredi men had been exempt from military service. The IDF has stated that it would be able to draft 3,000 Haredi yeshiva students in the 2024 enlistment year, in addition to accommodating an annual average of 1,800 Haredi men who choose to enlist

Imagine a Jewish resort in the mountains where graduate students are playing board games and children are splashing in the swimming pool. Senior citizens are listening to lectures under a larger maple tree. And all of this is going on in Yiddish. The Yiddish Vokh (Yiddish week), sponsored by the Yiddishist organization Yugntruf, has been hosting retreats like this for 48 years. Guests spend a week together steeped in Yiddish, on the grounds of the Berkshire Hills Eisenberg Camps in Copake, NY. This year’s event will be held from Aug. 16-22.    Yugntruf photo