There’s a Yiddish saying, “It’s hard to be a Jew.” But according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, Jews enjoy the highest well-being of all religious groups. The research shows that the most religious members of all American religious groups have the highest well-being. Very religious Jews lead the way at 72. Read More »

Getty Images Portman at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in January Natalie Portman is big everywhere in the world, including in Beirut, Lebanon, where she appears on a 50-foot billboard for Dior cosmetics. But not everyone is a fan. Read More »

iStockphoto Want to lose weight? Just eat dessert with your breakfast. You read that correctly: Treat yourself to some chocolate cake or ice cream in the morning and you are more likely to take off and keep off the pounds. Read More »

Getty Images Matisyahu in 2010, with full beard Reggae star Matisyahu had two surprises in store for concert-goers who had come to see him perform at The Tarrytown Music Hall on February 16. The first was the re-growth of his beard. Read More »

Israel’s Orthodox community is anxious, as the country’s most revered rabbi, Yosef Shalom Eliyashiv, is in a serious condition at a Jerusalem hospital. The 101-year-old scholar has been in a coma for almost two weeks. In synagogues across the country worshipers are praying for him — but some people are going further. Read More »

Seeking to sabotage Britain’s economy in World War II, the Nazis “flooded” Europe with fake British bank notes, according to secret documents released today by British intelligence agency MI5. Read More »

Getty Images As Us Weekly likes to tell us, “they’re just like us!” Celebrities apparently do things that regular folks do, like go to the grocery store, make a coffee run, drive a car or change a diaper. But when it comes to eating, it would seem that gorgeous supermodels definitely don’t do as much of it as the rest of us. Read More »

iStockphoto Of all the ways that religion impacts the Israeli public sphere, the lack of public transportation in most of the country on Sabbaths and religious holidays has possibly the largest week-to-week impact on people’s lives. It means that those who don’t have their own vehicles can’t get far from home on these days. Read More »

Getty Images Socialite Zelda Kaplan, who based on her style could have been separated at birth from Iris Apfel, died suddenly on February 15 while at a New York Fashion Week show. To be more precise, the 95-year-old collapsed while sitting in the front row at the Joanna Mastroianni runway show and died in hospital shortly thereafter. Read More »

iStockphoto It’s the ultimate guilty pleasure here in Israel: “Big Brother.” As always, the contestants are having a ball, but the current season seems to be arriving upon increasingly bizarre situations. Keen to set increasingly off-the-wall “challenges” for contestants, the producers wanted to bring a cow in to the contestants’ house. Read More »

Jewish and Israeli news junkies are rejoicing at the launch yesterday of yet another media outlet — The Times of Israel. The Jerusalem-based online-only publication is helmed by British-born David Horovitz, formerly editor and publisher of The Jerusalem Report and editor-in-chief at the Jerusalem Post. Read More »

Getty Images In what sounds like a plot twist from one of his famous father’s films, 27-year-old Sean Stone — Oliver’s offspring — has reportedly converted to Islam on a trip to Iran. Read More »

Getty Images Now that Fran Drescher is happily divorced from a gay man and has a TV Land series called — wait for it —”Happily Divorced” about (surprise!) a woman divorced from a gay man, the ex-Nanny is ready to marry some gay people. Don’t misunderstand. Read More »

The trouble with living in a logorrheoic country at a time when speech is free, public and almost unashamedly unfiltered is that the careful observations of the geniuses who made it possible seem asinine. Case in point: Sigmund Freud. Read More »

Philip and Dorothy Grossman could think of no better way to show their love for each other, their family and for Israel than to make aliyah this Valentine’s Day. The husband and wife, ages 95 and 93 respectively, are the oldest couple to have ever immigrated to Israel. Read More »

Getty Images Just last week we were treated to a provocative fashion spread in Israel’s Belle Mode magazine that was both inspired by and meant to protest the exclusion of women in the public sphere. In it, the models struck sexy poses, wearing ultra-Orthodox garb, in a vintage bus. Read More »

Eight-year-old Lauren Kaufman closed the first pledge, a donation of $6000, at the Sunday February 12 kickoff for Super Week, the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’ annual fundraiser. Read More »

Flogging a tired meme to death is something that the internet does better than any other human tool. I haven’t seen the YouTube posting for “S**t Abortionists Say,” but surely it’s out there promoting civil dialogue — laughter being the best medicine, after all. Read More »

Getty Images Davis with Houston at the Grammy Awards in 2007 “There ain’t no party like a Clive Davis party,” said Sean “Diddy” Combs at Clive Davis’s pre-Grammy party this past Saturday night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. Read More »

Getty Images It seems Mayim Bialik is everywhere these days. The doctor of neuroscience stars as the character Amy Farrah Fowler on “The Big Bang Theory,” writes a weekly column for Kveller, and is the go-to attachment parenting expert for NBC’s Today show and others. She even has a book on attachment parenting coming out this spring. Read More »