Culture

Author Sue Monk Kidd says "The Book of Longings" explores the question "how the Western world would be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story."

The "Wonder Woman" star will also produce the film with her husband Jaron Versano. "Irena Sendler" tells the story of a Polish nun who smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety.

Olga Tokarczuk awarded 2018 prize after delay caused by scandal. Her 2015 novel "The Book of Jacob" deals with Poland's relations with its Jewish minority and neighboring Ukraine.

The former "House of Cards" actor, who has been mired in controversy over the past year due to alleged sexual misconduct, was spotted at a famous restaurant in Tel Aviv, catching the locals by surprise.

"No one told me there would be anything wrong with going or that I could possibly be offending anyone," she writes after being bombarded with hate-filled comments criticizing her praise of the Jewish state.

As author Seth Frantzman leads us through the sequence of events that slowly squeezed ISIS out of vast areas of Iraq and Syria that it had originally conquered, he provides an informed commentary on their impact.

Roman Polanski’s new film “An Officer and a Spy,” a portrayal of the notorious Dreyfus affair in 19th-century France, premieres at the Venice International Film Festival to renewed controversy over the director, given his conviction for a sex crime. Festival organizers have faced criticism for including it in the program but have defended the move, saying it is the film and not the man being judged.

Long after visitors have made their daytime pilgrimages to trendsetting clubs, Jerusalem's bars and impromptu art exhibits come alive. Young liberals in the city say they are on a mission to to provide a haven of sanity - or craziness - to people of all faiths, genders and nationalities who just want to have fun and break loose from Jerusalem's harsh realities.

Haredi singer whose gender-segregated concert in Afula sparked nationwide controversy about gender segregation at publicly-sponsored events calls Israeli policy hypocritical. "People everywhere understand that there is an audience that wants this. But not in Israel."