Barbara Finkelstein
By Barbara Finkelstein
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Yiddish World Why Was Historian Who Blames Jews For Complicity with Nazis Considered For Humanitarian Prize?
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Jeffrey Gottlieb is getting fifteen minutes of fame for the second time in his life. The co-founder of the “Polish-Jewish Dialogue Committee,” Gottlieb has spoken with Jewish organizations and news outlets this week to explain why his group bestowed its “Jan Karski Humanitarian Award” on Ewa Kurek,…
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Life Here’s How To Make Russian Jewish Food Healthier
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When Meribel Goldwin arrived from Belarus in 1994, she was ten years old and skinny. A couple years of eating hot dogs and sliced white bread on a food stamp budget, as well as traditional Russian foods prepared with sugar, salt and hydrogenated fats, turned her into…
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Yiddish World An Iranian Jewish Convert Flees To The United States
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Cracow was an unlikely tourist stop for William Mehrvarz. Most Iranian millennials want to “See Iran First,” and their vacation itineraries often include the Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan or the Valley of Stars on the island of Qeshm. Mehrvarz opted for Cracow in August 2016 to investigate…
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Culture Her Stunningly Intimate Photographs Of Hasidic Life
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. On the coldest day of the year, the Polish photographer Agnieszka Traczewska stands in a snowbound forest an hour’s car ride from Krakow. Dressed in thermal pants and a black scarf, Traczewska has lost track of time in her quest to get a shot of her usually…
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Yiddish World Pessimism About Iran, Clashes Over Campus Anti-Semitism Dominate Jewish Review Of Books Conference
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As midrash has it, the righteous spend eternity in heaven studying Torah. On January 14, the Jewish Review of Books brought a little piece of comparable heaven to Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, featuring seven influential Jewish thinkers at its Third Annual Conference. Abraham Socher, the magazine’s…
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Culture How Photographer Bonnie Geller-Geld Captures Luminous Moments of Humanity
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Judging by her portfolio, Bonnie Geller-Geld is a little like the character in Woody Allen’s “Zelig” who has a knack for inserting himself into life’s big moments. She was on the scene with her Canon DSLR in 1988 when Leonard Bernstein took a bow at his 70th…
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Yiddish World Activists to Novominsk Rebbe: Support Victims, Not Predators
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The third child sexual abuse awareness protest in Brooklyn this year got off to a quiet start. That was actually good news for the dozen demonstrators in front of Borough Park’s Novominsk Yeshiva on this warm fall afternoon. At a previous rally, elsewhere in Brooklyn, an ultra-Orthodox…
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Culture The Mystery Behind The Lost Books Of A Cherished Lublin Yeshiva
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. S. Y. Stupnitsky, a forgotten twentieth-century Jewish journalist, made a prescient observation about the great historic Jewish structures in Europe: “Jews built them, and today non-Jews possess them.” Stupnitsky’s words certainly ring true about Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, the educational brainchild of Meir Shapiro, a Polish rabbi who…
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