Ralph Seliger
By Ralph Seliger
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Culture Bielskis vs. Hollywood
Here’s a fast-paced Holocaust film with able, big-name stars Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber and directed by the accomplished Edward Zwick, who is sympathetically recounting a gripping tale of tough and resourceful Jews. So why is this reviewer disappointed? By all accounts, the three oldest Bielski brothers were heroic fighters who preserved the lives of…
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Opinion The Progressive Politics We Need
For 108 years, the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring has represented the best of the American Jewish progressive tradition. The Workmen’s Circle has been a champion of labor, a voice for social justice and a foe of communist totalitarianism. It fought for the freedom of Soviet Jews and for civil rights here at home. Though its roots…
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Israel News Oscar Winners Tell Their Story
And the Oscar goes to… “The Counterfeiters.” This Austrian Holocaust tale beat out the Israeli entry “Beaufort” and three other movies on February 24 for the Academy Award in the best foreign language film category. “The Counterfeiters” is based on the published memoir of 90-year-old survivor Adolph Burger, who consulted on the script and is…
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News Muravchik, 90, Socialist and Jewish Labor Committee Leader
When Emanuel Muravchik, a son of secular Russian Jewish immigrants, recalled his “bar mitzvah,” he was not thinking of a religious ceremony, which he didn’t have. He recalled the day in 1930, at age 13, that he was given free rein in the library of the Rand School, then associated with the Socialist Party, and…
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Opinion Less Than Reassuring Words at Columbia University
The question of whether an anti-Israel atmosphere exists at Columbia University, as alleged in recent news reports, will presumably be answered in an internal investigation. But it’s apparent from a recent event hosted at that Ivy League campus that pro-Israel views, regardless of ideological shading, are under seige. Columbia hosted a November 20 forum titled…
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Culture FALL BOOKS
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies By James Bamford Doubleday, 420 pages, $26.95. * * *| This past August, the news broke of an FBI probe into a possible leak to Israel of classified intelligence information via the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The leak…
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News Bad Friends and Fellow Travelers
To coincide with the 50th anniversary last month of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, their younger son, Robert Meeropol, released his new memoir, “An Execution in the Family” (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). Coincidentally, the same season saw the Lincoln Center debut of “A Bad Friend,” a play by cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer…
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Opinion Reconsidering Antisemitism
All seats were sold for this month’s “Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West” conference at the Center for Jewish History in New York. It was addressed by a glittering assemblage of academics, journalists and activists from the United States, England, France, Poland, Israel, Italy, Canada, Mexico and even Iran. Much brilliance was on…
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