Benjamin Soskis
By Benjamin Soskis
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Culture Judging Aharon
Last March, when the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists decided to give its 2007 Pursuit of Justice Award to Aharon Barak, the recently retired chief judge of the Israeli Supreme Court, they chose a surprising colleague to present the honor: Antonin Scalia. The ceremony was held in the august interior of the Supreme…
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Culture The Capitol Gang
The recipe for a successful reality television series is relatively straightforward. Take a bunch of young, attractive coeds, cram them into a tight space and stoke their competitive instincts with a common challenge that demands both teamwork and individual distinction. Set up a camera, and voilá: instant drama, or, at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof….
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News Romancing ‘Failed Sciences’
In 1665, among the many residents of England’s plague-ridden cities who fled to the less-contagious countryside were two men of science, one escaping from Cambridge and the other from London. The former, the young Isaac Newton, we know and revere. The latter, the elderly William Lilly, we do not. Some 30 years earlier, Lilly had…
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News Falun Gong Suit Divides Capital
Last October, while then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin was visiting the United States, he received an unwelcome surprise. Practitioners of the spiritual movement known as Falun Gong, which was outlawed by the Chinese government in 1999, served his security detail with notice of a lawsuit filed against him in a Chicago federal court. The class-action suit…
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News Parley Takes a Fresh Look at World’s Oldest ‘Demon’
There is often comfort in the familiar, even in a familiar evil. That is why in the analysis of antisemitism, the historical approach, the search for continuities, is often an emotionally and rhetorically conflicted one. Casting one’s eyes back on the past millennia of persecution offers a terrifying vista. But if such a perspective can…
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News New Talk Radio Format: Minorities Spar With Chasids
When WWRL-AM (1600), one of the nation’s oldest black-owned and -operated radio stations, hosted an event last week at the Times Square Planet Hollywood to celebrate its new line-up, the buffet was laden with treyf Buffalo wings and hamburgers. But there was another table, too, stacked with glatt kosher meals. This was no catering snafu;…
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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News Protesters picket Manhattan synagogue over Israel real estate sale, testing Mamdani and new law
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Opinion I’m an Orthodox student in NYC. I’m grateful Mamdani vetoed the school buffer bill
In Case You Missed It
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Looking Forward My artist grandmother nearly made aliyah. I don’t know what she’d think of Israel today
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Film & TV Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique?
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Fast Forward Israeli man indicted in attack on Catholic nun in Jerusalem’s Old City