Beth Schwartzapfel
By Beth Schwartzapfel
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Culture Warhol’s Tribe
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol — as good a time as any to reminisce, in these pages, about the famed artist’s place in Jewish history. Although Warhol is best known for his portraits of such pop icons as Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy, in 1980 he also completed…
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News Women’s Groups Split Over Texas Governor’s Vaccination Plan
In a surprise move, certain pro-choice women’s organizations — including the largest Jewish one — are joining Christian conservatives in criticizing the governor of Texas for requiring sixth-grade girls to be vaccinated against a cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease. Governor Rick Perry, who is generally seen as a staunch ally of the Christian right, last week…
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Israel News Don’t Tell Bubbe: Gentile is Kosher Queen
A panel of experts convened in New York City last week to determine the country’s best kosher cook, and the results may come as a surprise: The winner was not Jewish. Riding her delicious sweet potato encrusted chicken to victory, Candace McMenamin of Lexington, S.C., won the first-ever Simply Manischewitz Cook-off. About 350 people packed…
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News Looking for Love In All the Right Books
For the involuntarily single and the recently dumped, Valentine’s Day has long been an opportunity to mope, feel sorry for oneself, and lick the wounds that others are salting with their roses and chocolates. However, three of this season’s new books may help keep hope alive. Aimed at the unattached, the single mother and the…
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News Irena Kirkland, 81, Human Rights Advocate
Human rights advocate Irena Kirkland died January 24 at her home in Washington. She was 81. An outspoken advocate for democracy in the Soviet bloc during the 1980s, Kirkland and her husband, Lane Kirkland, AFL-CIO president from 1979 to 1995, were renowned for their dinner parties, where such democracy-activist luminaries as Alexander Solzhenitsyn regularly shared…
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Israel News A Swank Passover
While Jews everywhere are dipping their pinkies in kosher wine and chanting the names of the plagues that befell the Pharaoh and his people, multiplexes nationwide will be offering Hollywood’s latest twist on the story. “The Reaping,” starring Hilary Swank as a skeptic investigating an outbreak of plagues in a small Southern town, opens March…
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Culture Doors Open for Disabled Kids
Each week, Michelle Alkon tried to light Shabbat candles with her family. But each week, when her son Ben saw the burning candles he would sing “Happy Birthday” and blow them out. “I wanted to have a happy Jewish home, [but] after week after week of trying to teach him that [Shabbat] was a special…
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Culture Jewish Studies Take Off, North of the Border
‘Thirty years ago, the Jewish community of Canada was not a subject for winning tenure at a university,” said Ira Robinson, professor of Judaic studies at Montreal’s Concordia University. Now, all over Canada, scholarly journals, academic conferences, university institutes and endowed professorships are cropping up around a subject that might have seemed parochial a generation…
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