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Menachem Wecker

Menachem Wecker is the U.S. bureau news editor of JNS.

“Even though Frank Gehry was reluctant to unveil his Jewish identity until later in life, his work displays subversion of convention,” leading architect Daniel Libeskind told JNS. “That aspect is certainly a Jewish sensibility.”
“They could go to a museum even in the Gulf, where people could see another side of Israel, an artistic side, a beautiful side,” Bernard Shapero told JNS.
Albert Goldman “was brilliant,” June Brandt, senior research analyst in postal history at the U.S. Postal Service, told JNS. “His focus was to make the New York City post office relevant and well known.”
“It’s not just a display of the scrolls, which of course in and of themselves would be powerful,” but other “wow objects” leave viewers in awe, the museum’s director of exhibits told JNS.
“It would be very easy” to conclude from a floor speech by Sen. Chris Coons that “Jews in the first century only helped and supported their own,” the scholar Malka Simkovich told JNS.
“Here you sing these Psalms every day, yet on Good Friday you go out and you beat up your Jewish neighbors,” Roger Wieck, of the Morgan Library and Museum, told JNS. “I don’t have an answer for you.”
“They reveal the Jewish year not as an app or a feed but as something literally held together by thread and parchment, calibrated by generations who turned those pages on the eve of festivals and fasts,” Chaim Neria told JNS.
The “very profound” deepening of Israel’s connection to Judaism of several decades accelerated “intensely” after Oct. 7, Rabbi Jeffrey Woolf told JNS.
“We are changing the Middle East, and we are turning the Middle East into a new Middle East,” Ofir Akunis told JNS.
The museum’s president and CEO told JNS that he hopes visitors will learn about the Holocaust and its root causes and apply that to understanding the world today.
“For most of our country’s history, the Bible was found in every classroom in the nation,” U.S. President Donald Trump said at a hearing. “In many schools today, students are instead indoctrinated with anti-religious propaganda.”
Amichai Chikli, the Israeli Diaspora minister, told JNS that “we should dream, pray for having the vast majority of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael.”