Now that I have left the Forward to join the reporting staff at the Los Angeles Times, I am no longer faced with the familiar look from old friends when I tell them where I work. “You work for a Jewish newspaper!?” they’d ask incredulously. “I didn’t even know you were Jewish.” I never figured…
When President Obama dropped in on a meeting of his national security adviser in March, he found him deep in discussion with a number of advisers from past administrations on one of the most sensitive of topics on the ever-sensitive Middle East: whether the United States should at some point lay out its own plan…
The informal boycott imposed by Israel’s ambassador to Washington on the dovish lobby J Street ended Thursday with a meeting between Ambassador Michael Oren and Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s founder and president. Prior to Thursday’s meeting, the Israeli embassy in Washington maintained only low-level contacts with the dovish lobby and ambassador Oren declined an invitation…
LAINIE KAZAN: “AN HONORARY ITALIAN” HONORED AT BOYS’ TOWNS OF ITALY GALA “Kutcher’s is the password,” I said to Lainie Kazan at the April 8 Boys’ Towns of Italy “Ball of the Year” Gala, at which she was honored as Celebrity of the Year. We briefly reminisced about Kutcher’s, now the only Catskills resort, where…
Forward reporter Josh Nathan-Kazis sits down with colleagues Gal Beckerman, a staff writer, and Larry Cohler-Esses, the news editor, to discuss President Obama’s push for new U.N. sanctions against Iran. They weigh in on which trade-offs will be necessary to get Russia and China to support the sanctions, the coded language that Jewish leaders use…
Each day, when I pick up my son up from school, I ask him how his day was, and his answer is always the same: “Boring.” When I then ask him what he did, he tells me about activities he enjoyed, who he played with on the jungle gym, and the new things he learned….
Are Jews an ethnic or a religious group? This perennial question is now at the heart of a Jewish communal effort to get the U.S. Department of Education more deeply involved in probing allegations of antisemitism on college campuses. Thirteen national Jewish organizations have sent a letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan arguing that…
Two years ago, Poland’s president brought its chief rabbi to the Katyn Forest, where in 1940, 20,000 Polish army officers were slaughtered at the order of Josef Stalin. There, the politician insisted on showing the cleric a memorial plaque erected for Rabbi Baruch Steinberg, the army’s World War II-era chief rabbi, who was murdered with…
Anne Frank’s Facebook page looks much like any other teenage girl’s: The profile picture shows Anne leaning against a wall; her hair is tucked behind her ears, and she stares off sideways, daydreaming perhaps, a slight smirking smile lifting up the corner of her mouth. The comments on her “wall” are typical, too. “We share…
When well-organized hecklers disrupted a recent London performance by the Jerusalem Quartet, the protest resonated far beyond Wigmore Hall, the city’s famous and much loved lunchtime place of pilgrimage for music lovers seeking a break from the hubbub of central London. Not only did the disturbance cause the BBC to pull the plug on its…
Sam Weinreb and Anna Theresa Bachmann couldn’t be more different. He’s an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor; she’s a 19-year-old German whose grandfather was a member of Hitler’s Waffen SS, which played a leading role in the destruction of European Jewry. Yet, they share a common goal: They have joined together to give talks about the Holocaust…
