It’s a late Monday afternoon in October, Election Day looming like a thunderhead over the Mojave Desert, and John Burton, chairman of the California Democratic Party, is gruff but confident. The campaign is “going fine for the senator,” he grumbles on the phone from his Sacramento office, noting the leading position his candidate, Barbara Boxer,…
The dirt road that someone cut through a few feet of brush to connect the Hasidic village of New Square to the playing fields of Hillcrest Elementary School in early October is only the latest in a series of puzzles surrounding the contested sale of the shuttered public school. In this ethnically divided section of…
For the past 18 years, Wisconsin, where Jews constitute 0.5% of the population, has sent two Jews to fill its Senate seats. But as Election Day nears, one of those two is now fighting for his political life. Over the course of three terms, Democrat Russ Feingold has earned a reputation as one of the…
After a 39-year absence, on September 11 the Israeli women’s national volleyball team qualified for the 2011 European Championships. The success seems to tell a story of things looking up in Israeli women’s volleyball, and in women’s sports in general. Since the allocation by the state of an extra 1 million shekels ($275,000) three years…
Lou Henkin, founding father of human rights law and a leading light of Columbia Law School’s faculty, was a central figure in so many different communities — among those working in the human rights field, legal academics and lawyers, as well as in the Jewish community. To my mind, these different passions in Henkin’s life…
Motl Zelmanowicz, activist in American Jewish socialist and Yiddishist causes and longtime member of the Forward Association, died October 16 at the age of 95. Born to a socialist family in Lodz, Poland, Zelmanowicz was the son of a prominent member of the Lodz branch of the General Jewish Labor Bund in Poland, a Jewish…
“Nora’s Will’ — In Search of a Kosher Funeral — Not Necessarily Kosher L’pesach So how do you bury a Mexican-Jewish woman who committed suicide? A woman who, before doing the deed, sets a meticulous Seder table, leaves a refrigerator full of food with labeled cooking instructions and designates her ex-husband — an atheist —…
Kvetch: • The Berenstain Bears Get Biblical • Paladino’s Apology Sticks in Rabbi Levin’s Throat • Protesters of Extreme Gender Segregation Report Personal Threats Kvell: • U.S. Businessmen May Launch Israeli Baseball League • Thoroughly Modern Mikveh? • The Fruit of ‘Franzenfreude’
I’m riding in the back seat of a 1979 funeral limousine, searching for dead people. Inside, there is red lighting, spooky organ music and a skull the size of a cat’s head, affixed to the gearshift. A small group of us sits in the limo instead of in the usual vehicle, a tricked-out purple hearse,…
It’s a little like pennies from heaven, or, really, Hanukkah gelt tumbling out of the sky. You’re having a normal, adult day — work, worries, whatever — when suddenly you hear a Yiddish word. Sometimes it’s schmear or schlump. But once in a while it’s shlof (sleep) or shayne (pretty), and suddenly the timeline of…
Searching for Jews in politics sometimes requires looking beyond New York and Florida. How many of us remember that Linda Lingle, a proud member of the tribe, is governor of Hawaii? (And if that is not exotic enough — she is also a Republican.) And how many have noticed that in Alaska, Jewish Democrat Ethan…
דער זומער איז אַן עקשן, ער וויל ניט, וויל ניט קומען, הגם אויף בייטן וואַקסן צעקווייטיקט שוין די בלומען.
