CAIRO — In a spartan office within sight of the Great Pyramids at Giza, the civic education clubs of the Taha Hussein Association are busy working to instill the values of citizenship in today’s Egyptian schoolchildren. With a glossy 48-page booklet already in classrooms, director Kamal Mougheeth and his colleagues are trying to mold modelRead More

U.S. Refraining From Criticism Of Gaza Foray

By Ori Nir

WASHINGTON — With their countries mounting parallel military offensives against terrorist strongholds in Iraq and Gaza, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a high-powered White House meeting Monday.Moments after the talks, reporters asked Netanyahu if Rice had urged IsraelRead More

Some Holiday: Iraq Troops Lack Rabbis, Safe Passage to Services

By Orly Halpern

Specialist Dan Freedman woke up at 0300 hours — 3 a.m. —September 15. It was dark and he was tired, but he was determined to get from his base at Camp Victory to Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace in the capital. He put on his uniform, grabbed his M-16 and went looking for his two Jewish comrades-in-arms to join him on an urgentRead More

A City’s Renewal Fails To Dim Lure of Suburbs

By Nathaniel Popper

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Across a highway from the Hawthorne Plaza mall, the largest Jewish congregation in Kansas City’s metropolitan area has recently found a new home next to grassy fields of chirping cicadas.After its historic synagogue in the city was demolished last September, B’nai Jehudah became the latest, andRead More

Traces of Trotsky, Remnants of a Rebbe: A Hunt for Icons

By Stephen Schwartz

Democracy took a half-step forward in Kazakhstan when the September 19 parliamentary elections resulted in victory for Otan, the party that supports President Nursultan Nazarbayev and is expected to take seven of the 10 seats in the lower house. True, monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe declared that the electionRead More

Showdown Set for Communal Debate Over Sharon’s Gaza Withdrawal Plan

By Ori Nir, With Reporting From Steven I. Weiss and Jta

WASHINGTON — Under pressure from one of its most powerful members, a key Jewish communal body is preparing to consider endorsing the disengagement plan of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.The issue is to be debated at an upcoming October 14 meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, theRead More

Damascus Whodunnit

By Ofer Shelah

TEL AVIV — In his lifetime, Iz a-Din al-Sheikh Khalil’s name was known only to the top Hamas experts within the Israeli and Western intelligence communities. Though he was a senior political-military operative, he wasn’t one of the recognized faces of the Palestinian movement, like Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Abd al-Aziz Rantisi orRead More

Poverty Is a ‘Jewish’ Issue

By Amy Schwartzman

One year ago, I had the opportunity to meet with President Bush, along with 15 other rabbis, just a few days before Yom Kippur.Each of us was offered the opportunity to raise a question with the president. I chose to speak about the issue of poverty, in particular the concern for low-income parents who have no childRead More

Department Store Lore: A History

By Jenna Weissman Joselit

Okay, I’ll admit it: I love to shop, especially in tony department stores like Bergdorf Goodman, that Fifth Avenue emporium of luxe whose 100th anniversary is right around the corner. In search of visual pleasure, not to mention the joys of ownership, I delight in making my way past vitrine after vitrine, one more glorious than the next. For me,Read More

Roth’s Fanfare for the Common Man

By Mark Shechner

The Plot Against America By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin Company, 400 pages, $26. ——Knitting domains together — domestic and global, story and back-story — always has been iffy for Philip Roth. He understands life best in the lower case — inside the family, the marriage, the disheveled heart, the desperate moment. HisRead More

Arts & Culture

By Oren Rawls