The Paley Center for Media is hosting a big event about Jewish life in America

There’s a new evening on the calendar for anyone who’s been craving a conversation about Jewish life that isn’t filtered entirely through crisis. On Tuesday, July 28 at 6:30pm,The Paley Center for Media on West 52nd Street by Sixth Avenue is hosting “Beyond the Headlines: Jewish Life in America Today,” a program pulling together voices from journalism, business, faith and culture to talk about how Jewish identity actually gets told in the media right now. The panel will feature digital media expert Michael Kassan, public relations guru Richard Edelman and Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, with CNN’s Bianna Golodryga moderating. The premise is simple but overdue: instead of another hour spent litigating antisemitism as an abstraction, look at how Jewish communities are actually living, creating and showing up in this country, and ask what media’s job is in reflecting that accurately.

The event is the opening chapter of a four-part series under Paley’s long-running PaleyImpact initiative, Media’s Role in Combating Antisemitism, which has been running since 2020. The series has always operated on a fairly direct thesis: media doesn’t just report on antisemitism, it can actively work against it by putting the right people in a room and letting the conversation get specific instead of theoretical. Four years in, it’s become one of the more consistent convenings on this subject in New York’s cultural calendar.

Kassan, whose support (alongside Edelman’s) is funding this next chapter of the series, said in an official statement that the stories told about a community, and the conversations built around them, shape how people see each other and that, right now, Jewish life is too often viewed only through the lens of adversity. That’s a fair diagnosis of the moment: plenty of coverage of Jewish America right now defaults to conflict, security or grievance, with far less oxygen for the actual texture of contemporary Jewish life underneath it.

Tickets for the talk are available here. If this first night resonates, there are three more conversations coming in the series, all under the same Kassan- and Edelman-backed umbrella, with details to follow through Paley’s membership channels and social accounts.

This event lands in the middle of the Paley Center’s 50th anniversary year, which has already brought a renovated theater and refreshed public spaces to the museum, along with a packed slate of programming, including World Cup watch parties, the return of PaleyFest NY, live podcast tapings, that’s clearly aiming to make the building feel like a living cultural hub rather than an archive with a gift shop.