In Other Jewish Newspapers: Loving Rudy, Murder Mystery, Groovy Shabbat
ARMENIANS AND US: Harvard Armenian studies professor James Russell offers a broad — and personal — take on Armenian-Jewish relations in Boston’s Jewish Advocate. “Armenia has strong ties to Iran and Syria; Israel has a strategic alliance with Turkey. We Jews need not apologize to anybody: Our country is in a dangerous neighborhood,” Russell writes. “I’m glad the Anti-Defamation League recognizes the Armenian genocide now. But I feel uneasy when the spotlight of denial is focused on us…”
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?: In an opinion article for The New York Jewish Week, Reform movement leaders Rabbi Eric Yoffie and Rabbi David Saperstein say that the Jewish community should be backing a bill to recognize the Armenian genocide.
Also in the Jewish Week: Ernest Adams shares his black-Jewish journey; a new Hebrew-language charter school has Jewish day school supporters up in arms; Jewish burlesque artists show some tuchus; and Buffalo’s JCC struggles, along with other Rust Belt Jewish communities.
LOVING RUDY: Rudy Giuliani talks tough on the Palestinian front, and Brooklyn’s right-wing Jewish Press eats it up.
‘DIRTY JEWS’: Jewish groups are now backing a cop who says he faced antisemitism from fellow officers, The New Jersey Jewish News reports.
‘MONUMENTS TO VANITY’: Philadelphia Jewish Exponent executive editor Jonathan Tobin pans a controversial Hebrew-language Florida charter school — calling it a “direct threat” to day schools. Tobin also eloquently excoriates philanthropists who would rather fund multimillion-dollar museums than real Jewish education. “While the appeal of Jewish museums, which have sprouted up in North America like ‘opera houses’ in the 19th-century American West, speaks volumes about the desire of American Jews to create monuments to our own colossal communal vanity, it can at least be said that the host of new Jewish history and Holocaust museums on these shores are contributions to education,” he writes. “But talk of funding education via museums is as much of a dodge as the notion that a Hebrew charter school can accomplish what a full-time comprehensive Jewish day school can.”
A DEATH IN PRAGUE: The JTA looks back at a 40-year-old murder mystery: Who killed Charles Jordan, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s chief executive?
ABUSE SERIES: The Baltimore Jewish Times continues its series on abuse allegations in the Jewish community.
FAR OUT: The San Diego Jewish Journal has a groovy Shabbat at the Universal Temple of Higher Consciousness: “As the Kiddush cup is being passed around, a psychedelic purple swirl is projected on the ceiling above. Ancient Shabbat songs are sung in a highly spiritualized tone by the Jewish trio.”
SIREN SONG: Rabbi Harvey Belovksi explains (and defends) kol isha — “the prohibition against a man listening to a woman singing” — in London’s Jewish Chronicle.
Also in the JC: Three of the six contestants still in the running to win in British “Big Brother” are Jewish, and an Israeli institution calls Britain “a major source of publishing and distribution of Hamas incitement.”
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