The cover of Foreign Policy magazine’s latest edition is bright pink and carries a single quote: “For 30 years Mideast peace was my religion. I’m not a believer now.” Below is a crumpled up photo of Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn. Once it landed on desks…
Rabbi David Forman, 65, founder of the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights, died on May 3 in Dallas while awaiting a liver transplant. Forman, an American-born Reform rabbi, founded Rabbis for Human Rights in 1988, after the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada. The organization runs educational programs to highlight Judaism’s teachings on human…
A little more than a year ago, the Israeli government announced that it would refuse to provide information to the United Nations for its Goldstone Report. Now, some Israeli politicians want to enact legislation that, were it in force then, would have made it illegal for civilian organizations to do so. Some 17 lawmakers from…
Nearly 2 million high school students worldwide are taking Advanced Placement tests this May, hoping to impress college admissions counselors with high scores and, perhaps, earn a few college credits. But one test question citing the late Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said on the theme of exile is prompting protests from some Jewish students….
Trent Rosenbloom returned from a trip to find his family’s Nashville, Tenn., home in ruins, many of his beloved possessions washed away and his minivan totaled. Rosenbloom is a Vanderbilt University research physician who was born in Nashville and moved back in 1992. He contacted insurance adjusters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and structural engineers…
Last week, my husband kept asking me, “What do you want for Mother’s Day?” “Nothing,” I replied, which was the truth. Thankfully, I have everything I need, and there was no gift I wanted which came to mind. My grandmother flew into town from Connecticut for the weekend, and we spent Friday afternoon with my…
I got married last year. So it made sense that recently, when I went to a new doctor, I would put my husband as my emergency contact rather than my mom, who was across the country, in Los Angeles. I wasn’t at the doctor for anything serious, just a gluten-intolerance-related check-up with a new gastroenterologist….
This week’s Forward Reporters Roundtable focuses on the media campaign to secure a lenient sentence for Sholom Rubashkin, the former CEO of the now-defunct kosher meatpacking company Agriprocessors. Rubashkin was convicted on multiple counts of bank fraud, and his sentencing is expected in the coming weeks. In this podcast, reporter Josh Nathan-Kazis sits down with…
When 97 Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side welcomed its first families in 1863, tenants like Wilhelmina Glockner had to haul tubs of water for each day’s cooking and cleaning up the building’s narrow staircase. Even without iceboxes or running water, the kitchens in the cramped tenements were the heart of each home. More…
In late April, my mother’s cell phone rang, and at the end of the line was a woman to whom she had never before spoken. This woman had heard my brother give a speech in a London synagogue and was impressed, so she simply “had” to track down my mother, call her and give her…
“Tonight I, a 100% Galitzianer, will introduce Cindy and David Stone, both Litvaks,” said Charlie Rose at the April 26 YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s ninth annual Me’Dor Le’Dor (generation to generation) Heritage Dinner, held at the Center for Jewish History. A YIVO board member, Rose cited “Yiddishkeit and memory of the Lithuanian [Litvak] Jewish…
נאָך איר מאַנס טויט אין 2003 האָט זי געהאָלפֿן אַרויסגעבן זײַן לעקסיקאָן פֿון די ייִדישע שרײַבער אין ראַטן־פֿאַרבאַנד.
