My February 7 “Ask Wendy” column on collective punishment was ill received by many readers. Whenever I discover that my opinion is in the minority — a minority of one, it seems — I am prepared to take my licks in public. The points made in the letters below are compelling and valid, and I would have been well served to qualifyRead More
Mark Warshawsky (1840-1907) was a versatile poet whose songs voiced both hope and despair, depending on the situation he was describing. In his poem-song “Dem Milner’s Trern” (“The Miller’s Tears”), he sounds a note of melancholy. It is a dark dirge about the Jews who are being driven from their shtetl in czarist Russia. To the miller,Read More
We live in a pressure cooker. You can’t watch the news or read a newspaper without being bombarded with stories about war and terror threats. Our government gives us tips on how to prepare for possible chemical, biological or radiological attacks. The economy and stock market continue to sag. The Jewish psyche is taking a thrashing theseRead More
This week’s portion, Pekude, covers the last chapters of Exodus and so is a good place to try to draw some general lessons from our story of stories.The poets have been finding metaphors and similes in Exodus for quite some time. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), for example, found in the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-6) an extended metaphor forRead More
And Moses said to the people of Israel, “See, the Lord has called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability, with intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs…. [E]very able man in whom theRead More
Translating poetry from one language into another is always a daunting challenge. The translator must not only convey the essence of the original meaning but must also adhere to the rhymes and rhythms of the original. The task is doubly troublesome when the original material in English is a work of the Savoyards — as Gilbert and Sullivan areRead More
Now Georgie Bush’s in WashingtonHe got there by a stunt he spun:His friends in court said he’s the oneAlthough he really hadn’t won.Georgie said, “I don’t feel shame,For that’s the way we play the game.There’s nothing that should make you stop,So long as you end up on top.”He said he had a lesson learnedHe said his old man had beenRead More
Growing up in Birmingham, Ala., Gennye Feldman, along with her mother and her four siblings, kept kosher, ate Sabbath dinner on Fridays and drove to services at their Conservative synagogue every weekend.“Judaism was definitely a core part of our family values,” Gennye, a 28-year-old marketing manager, told the Forward.Now a young adult livingRead More
When 30-year-old fashion entrepreneur Molly Stern was still a teenager, her boyfriend took her to a museum to gawk at the Botticelli paintings. “That’s your body,” he told the cute, curvy pubescent girl. “They’ve been painting you for centuries.”Of course, most Jewish women who can’t squeeze their hips into a pair of made-for-shiksasRead More
At a nightclub in New York’s East Village called the Sidewalk Café, a guy known as Rav Shmuel performed on a recent Saturday night, after the Sabbath had ended. The Rav, as he is known to friends and fans, closed his set with an original composition titled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion Are True.”“The Protocols of the Elders of ZionRead More
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