Tanenbaum Honors Papal Nuncio and Other Religious Bridge Builders While welcoming the guests to the June 17 Mark H. Tanenbaum Award Ceremony & Memorial Lecture, held at the Pierre, founder and president Georgette Bennett articulated the Tanenbaum Foundation’s mission: “… to confront and overcome the horrors [perpetrated] in the name of religion.” In a lighter…
Noticeably mild-mannered and unassuming, David Passig sits down at his kitchen table, pours a glass of apple juice and states matter-of-factly that he will now predict the future: a second term for Obama. Another decade of recession. Two global confrontations (one with America and Turkey facing Russia, around 2020, and another between America and Turkey,…
“Do big girls have bikes without training wheels?” my daughter Hannah asked me, as she rode her tricycle. Hannah knew that her brother’s bike didn’t have training wheels, but she wasn’t sure why. Hannah is three, and her brother Jeremy is six. She knows that she can’t do some of the activities he can, but…
On June 8, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman made a trip to the United States. He met leaders of the Jewish community, attended the opening ceremony of a community center in New York, briefed Israeli diplomats and returned to Jerusalem without making a stop in Washington. During his two-day trip, Lieberman did not meet any…
When Naftali Hanau graduated from New York University with an economics degree, he left prepared for a career in banking or investing. But the Rochester, N.Y., native chose a different path: one that likely includes more feathers and trucks than those of his fellow alumni. This July, Hanau’s company, Grow and Behold Foods, will launch…
Of all the things I never expected I’d hear coming out of the mouth of Malcolm Hoenlein, the powerful executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, “It’s time to set sail!” was certainly near the top of the list. But there he was, jacket and tie removed, a blue…
The mass protests of Haredim in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, and the 27-year prison sentence handed down to former Agriprocessors’ CEO Sholom Rubashkin are the subjects of this week’s Reporters’ Roundtable. Reporter Josh Nathan-Kazis speaks with editor Jane Eisner and staff writer Gal Beckerman about the Ashkenazim-Sephardim desegregation case that prompted the Israeli protests,…
NEWS ITEM: Students of Yiddish in universities are taught to treat nouns as either masculine or feminine. But among Hasidim — the foremost speakers of Yiddish today — grammatical gender is largely ignored. Hasidim, for example, use di (“the”) for most nouns without respect to the noun’s gender. (Di has historically been applied only to…
Hip, Hip, Hooray for National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene Hit ‘Hershele Ostropolyer’ What?! You haven’t seen “The Adventures of Hershele Ostropolyer”? The National Yiddish Theatre- Folksbiene’s delicious, delightful 80-minute musical, which opened on June 3 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center and runs until June 27, is, based on the positive reviews compiled by StageGrade.com, the top-rated…
Last weekend, I was at a gathering mostly of families with small children. When a young couple (who’ve only been married a couple years) came, one of the dads pointed to a child and joked: “Who said you could come to the party without one of these?!” The next day I was at a different…
Two hours before closing time on a Friday afternoon, three members of a Hasidic family walked into Pat Fairhurst’s pickle shop in a heavily Orthodox Jewish section of Boro Park, tempted by the sweet and sour pickles nesting in brine in big plastic barrels. The father looked around at the spare but functional store, smiled,…
