Ira Rifkin
By Ira Rifkin
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Community The day my son’s ashes arrived in the mail
The ashes came to my home in Maryland from Southern California, shipped via special delivery by the aptly named funeral home Ashes to Ashes. They arrived encased in a rectangular, polished, dark wood box about the size of a loaf of artisan bread. I immediately opened it to make sure it was not empty. It…
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News The Roots Of the Concord
Squeeze a Concord grape, and it practically screams kosher wine. Jelly sweet, the much maligned Concord has been the traditional kosher wine of choice at American Passover Seders for what seems like forever. So brace yourself for irony: The Concord has a suspected antisemitic horticultural past. Before there was Schapiro’s, the first American kosher vintner,…
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Opinion The Long Way Home to Lhasa
Tibet would seem to have little history in common with Israel. Yet much like Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple, today Tibetans face the daunting task of preserving their religious culture and national dreams while facing an indeterminate exile. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled political and cultural leader, is well aware of the…
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News How Celia Cruz Saved an Amazon Night
I came of age at just the right time to enjoy Celia Cruz — the greatest female singer salsa has ever produced — in her prime, and for her to help shape my lifelong musical tastes. Without her knowing it, she once helped get me out of a frightening situation in a drug-saturated Peruvian river…
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News Who was Horst Wessel, and why are people comparing Charlie Kirk to him?
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Culture Charlie Kirk kept a ‘Jewish Sabbath.’ What did he mean by that?
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Antisemitism Decoded Israel is being blamed for Charlie Kirk’s death. Here’s what that conspiracy theory says about the far right’s divide
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Film & TV Robert Redford’s legacy is surprisingly Jewish
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Yiddish World How a Yiddish acting troupe fooled the Tsarist government
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Fast Forward After years of war, world’s oldest synagogue paintings are revealed as intact in Damascus
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Fast Forward ‘Jews are banned from entering here!’ sign in German shop window spurs international backlash
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