Lenny Picker
By Lenny Picker
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Fast Forward The Jewish team behind the classic comedy ‘Airplane!’ explains how it got off the ground
In “Surely You Can’t Be Serious,” the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams describe the making of a cultural phenomenon
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Culture Abraham Lincoln’s greatest gift to the Jews
The roots of Abraham Lincoln’s Judeophilia can be traced back to his childhood in Indiana
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Culture All of Abraham Lincoln’s Chosen Friends
Abraham Jonas, the attorney, and Issachar Zacharie, the foot doctor, weren’t Lincoln’s only Jewish friends. Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell also illuminate the nature of the president’s close relationship with three other Jewish men. Julius Hammerslough, another clothing merchant, was probably Lincoln’s first Jewish friend. He attended the president’s 1861 inauguration and was a…
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Culture Was John Wilkes Booth Jewish?
In one of the most surprising sections of their new book, “Lincoln and the Jews,” historians Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell discuss the possibility that the president’s assassin belonged to a family of Spanish Jewish ancestry. Asia Booth Clarke, the sister of acclaimed actor John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln, stated in her 1882…
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News Jack the Ripper, One of Us? No, Thanks.
Was Jack the Ripper, one of the most notorious murderers of all time, and the subject of more than 125 years of ongoing investigations into his identity, Jewish? This allegation, as old as the crimes themselves, was given new life with the publication in September of Russell Edwards’s book “Naming Jack the Ripper,” the latest…
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News 6 Suspects in Jack the Ripper Case
In the past 50 years, armchair theorists have accused numerous prominent Victorians of being the Whitechapel murderer. Here are the most outrageous suspects. Lewis Carroll The anagrams of sentences in Carroll’s books described the killings in detail, Richard Wallace argued in his 1996 book “Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend.” King Leopold II of Belgium The…
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News 5 Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
The names of Jack the Ripper’s victims would have certainly been long forgotten had they not been murdered by the same hand. Mary Ann Nichols The mother of five was an alcoholic whose husband had left her seven years before her death in her early 30s. Nichols walked the streets the last night of her…
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Culture Jewish Creator of Modern German Police
As World War I neared its end, Germany turned its focus to internal security. Serious unrest in Berlin during the summer of 1918 led the Prussian Ministry of the Interior to make a surprising decision. Bernhard Weiss, a little-known Jewish war hero and recipient of the Iron Cross First Class, was ordered to leave the…
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News Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
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Fast Forward Their Pacific Palisades synagogue is standing, but all three rabbis lost their homes
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Music For Bob Dylan’s biographer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction
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News LA fires won’t stop bar mitzvahs this Shabbat, as joy and pain meet
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News HIAS cuts 22 staff even as it braces for Trump immigration crackdown
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Fast Forward A synagogue that survived the Palisades fire has become a ‘refuge’ for many who lost their homes
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News When fire spread to West Hollywood, a rabbi’s mom chose to grab candlesticks
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