TEL AVIV — As the latest power struggle in Israel’s Labor Party unfolds, it is hard to tell without a peek at the calendar whether the year is 2004, 1994 or even 1984.There is Shimon Peres, 81, hardly changed in his looks from the energetic prime minister of two decades ago, hotly debating with his would-be challengers for leadershipRead More

Survivor: Rosh Hashanah

By Katherine Brodsky

Reality TV casting call: One Jewish family needed, substantially observant and slightly neurotic, for test of strategy and endurance. There will be no island to get kicked off of and no cow’s testicles to eat, but you may have to face… the bar mitzvah caterer.That’s right, folks, someone finally realized what a challenge it is toRead More

The Work of a Worthy Diarist

By Allan Nadler

The Journals of Yaacov Zipper, 1950-1982: The Struggle for Yiddishkayt Translated from the Yiddish and edited by Mervin Butovsky and Ode Garfinkle McGill/Queens University Press, 192 pages, $39.95. * * *The appearance of the random, private journals of the obscure principal of a Canadian Yiddish school does not suggest an auspiciousRead More

Where Have All the Jews Gone?

By Norman Ravvin

When Toronto-based writer Matt Cohen died in 1999, he had just completed a memoir titled, “Typing: A Life in 26 Keys” (Random House, Canada 2000). Alongside its sharply drawn portrait of the Toronto literary and counter-cultural scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Typing” included a provocative challenge to the CanadianRead More

Gleanings

Below is an excerpt from “Survivors: Seven Short Stories,” by Chava Rosenfarb, which will be out this October from Cormorant Books Inc. I was happy to emigrate to Canada, which I considered a land “far from God and from people” — by which I meant former concentration camp inmates — where I would be unlikely ever to be confronted byRead More

A Boatload of Languor And Dreaminess

By Josh Lambert

House on the River: A Summer Journey By Nessa Rapoport Harmony Books, 146 pages, $22. ——–In literature’s most ambitious exploration of the collision between Canada and the Jews, “Solomon Gursky Was Here,” novelist Mordecai Richler conjured Ephraim Gursky, a highly Bronfmanesque patriarch and explorer who so influences InuitRead More

The Search for Reasons and Meanings

By David Curzon

The rabbis assumed that the text of the Torah was perfect so that any apparent discrepancy or repetition or contradiction had to be there for a reason. and it was up to us to impute a reason and formulate the lesson that it teaches. They also assumed that each sentence in the Torah had an infinite number of lessons to teach us.Read More

A Eulogy for New York

By Leonard Kriegel

Waterfront: A Journey Around ManhattanBy Phillip LopateCrown Publishers, 422 pages, $25.95.——–Writers love New York not for what it is, but for what it is in the writer’s imagination. Not even Paris intrigues us the way New York does, which is one of the reasons that the New York writer has become so distinct an American literary species,Read More

Home is Where the Heart Is: In the South Bronx

By Masha Leon

Lauding the Met Council’s “mix of government, the good people of the building industry and [the] nonprofit community that cares,” John Ruskay, UJA-Federation of New York executive vice president and CEO, set the tone for the August 10 Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty Builders’ luncheon at Tavern on the Green. Met Council CEO William Rapfogel touted his organization’s programs for the city’s 100,000 neediest each year (14 residences throughout New York for the elderly and formerly homeless; a kosher food pantry, which last year distributed 2.8 million pounds of food to more than 10,500 homeless… and more).Read More

When They Came For Martin Niemoller

By Harry Reynolds

Surely, it is a curiously compassionate thing to congratulate a 53-year-old Christian minister for his impressive achievement in 1945 of having finally developed into a defender of Jews at the end of the Holocaust.Last, and most tellingly, Niemoller was in prison on Kristallnacht, that November dayRead More

Arts & Culture

By Ofer Shelah