Lenny Picker
By Lenny Picker
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Culture Abraham Lincoln’s greatest gift to the Jews
Editor’s note: We have republished this story, originally published in 2015, for Presidents Day. “In central Jerusalem, close by streets named for the medieval Jewish luminary Moses Maimonides and the modern Hebrew writer Peretz Smolenskin, and abutting the American consulate, lies a crooked street named for Abraham Lincoln. When questioned about what he did for…
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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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Culture A tribute to Leopold Bloom and two different takes on motherhood: The Jewish books you need to know this month
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Fast Forward Landmark survey of Jewish LA reveals an increasingly diverse and engaged community
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Culture In the wake of the Supreme Court abortion decision, will the real gonif please stand up?
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