Alana Newhouse
By Alana Newhouse
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News It Takes a Village
Last Century of a Sephardic Community: The Jews of Monastir, 1839-1943 By Mark Cohen Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 432 pages, $34.95. * * *| Last month, I saw a Jewish homeless man near my apartment. He was wearing a yarmulke and muttering Hebrew words, and I think I saw a…
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News Bumpy Road to Success: From Strip Joints to Academia
There are coming-of-age books about Jewish identity, lesbianism, daughters’ relationships with their mothers, the Holocaust, being born out of wedlock, and the dark world of burlesque dancing. But Lillian Faderman’s autobiography, “Naked in the Promised Land” (Houghton Mifflin), just may be the first to cover all these bases in one fell swoop. Faderman, now 62,…
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News ‘Living Letters’: Tai Chi Meets the Aleph-Bet
If I stood with my heels together, distributed my weight evenly and curved my arms slightly at my sides with my palms facing backward, I would be starting to shape myself in the tai chi equivalent form of an aleph, the first letter of my Hebrew name. I would also be practicing Otiyot Khayyot, or…
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News When ‘All the Rest’ Was the Rage
If all the rest is commentary, as Hillel the Elder once said, there once was a time when “all the rest” was all the rage. It has been 58 years since the founding of Commentary magazine, a small Jewish journal devoted to society and culture that eventually landed in some of the most influential mailboxes…
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News Pro-Israel General Will Oversee Reconstruction of Postwar Iraq
With the United States poised to invade Iraq, attention has turned to retired army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the man set to govern the country in the event of an American military victory. Garner — who in 1991 helped lead Operation Provide Comfort, which delivered food and shelter to Kurds in northern Iraq after the…
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News Foe of Gay Ban Won’t Head Conservative Panel
On the eve of what was expected to be his first session as chairman of Conservative Judaism’s supreme lawmaking body, it was announced that Rabbi Elliott Dorff, an outspoken supporter of overturning the movement’s ban on ordaining homosexuals, will not assume the position. The move came on the heels of a request by the head…
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News Reform Rabbis Asking Temples To Fund Outreach Jobs
A showdown over budget cuts is brewing between the congregational arm of the Reform movement and several prominent Reform rabbis, who charge that the nation’s largest liberal Jewish denomination is crippling its outreach to intermarried families. A number of rabbis have initiated grass-roots fundraising efforts to save the jobs of the movement’s 13 regional outreach…
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News JTS Scholar To Argue for New Views on Gay Rabbi Ban
A leading Conservative scholar, scheduled to speak at an event sponsored by a gay rights group at the movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, is expected to argue that community norms can determine Jewish law. In an interview with the Forward, Judith Hauptman, a professor of Talmud at JTS, said that her theory — coming amidst intensifying…
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