JOBS WANTED!”—UJA JOB FAIRS — A LIFELINE TO THE RESCUE In the 1920s, David Meyerowich wrote the music and lyrics to the wrenching Yiddish lament “Vu Nemt MenParnosseh?” (“How Does One Make a Living?”); in 1931, Yip Harburg wrote the lyrics to Jay Gorney’s Great Depression anthem, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” On March…
About 30 years ago, when Illinois businessman David Brimm’s son was 2 years old, the family turned off the TV just before guests arrived for Passover dinner. Soon the Four Questions were being asked, and young master Brimm piped in with a fifth: “Why did you turn ‘The Smurfs’ off?” The family still asks that…
Haggadah for the Fifth Child By Donald B. Susswein Mill City Press, 141 pages Pity the humble Haggadah, the never-quite-good-enough book that Jews seem compelled to improve upon each year. ArtScroll’s general director Rabbi Nosson Scherman guesses there are more than 1,000 versions of the Haggadah in print today. This Passover, families seeking an alternative…
In a newly emergent theme, American supporters of Israel are stressing the possible damage that the Goldstone Report on Israel’s Gaza operation may cause to America’s military efforts worldwide. As the report, sponsored by the United Nations, won a nonbinding vote of support in the U.N. General Assembly recently, pro-Israel figures were striving to marshal…
A few days ago, my son, Jeremy, was drawing a picture. He took a picture of a robot and was coloring it in. I walked by him and noticed the bright colors and interesting pattern. I also noticed that his drawing skills were improving, relative to when he was younger. “I love the picture you’re…
More than 16 years after the euphoria of the Oslo Accords, the Israelis and the Palestinians have still not reached a final-status peace agreement. The diplomatic stalemate discredits moderates and plays into the hands of extremists on both sides who refuse to make the concessions that any viable peace treaty will require. Since an extended…
Natan Sharansky knows he’s disturbing the status quo. Days before the most recent meeting of the Board of Governors, the body that oversees the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sharansky, its relatively new chairman, declared that the agency’s traditional mission had outlived its usefulness. “It’s not enough to speak about aliyah,” Sharansky said, talking in front…
The Tea Party movement, a loose conglomeration of conservatives angry over government spending, is considered one of the most influential groups on today’s American political scene. For liberals and conservatives the Tea Party movement is a politically polarizing topic, but for the pro-Israel community it is a great unknown. With Tea Party activists focusing on…
A simple monument stands outside the town of Ilya in what is now Belarus. It is in memory of the hundreds of Jews taken from their home to this very spot, shot two or three at a time and pushed into a pit that had served as an ice cellar. Lisa Kudrow — best known…
“Do you suffer from ANIS?” That’s ANti-ISrael Fixation Syndrome, according to a caustic poster produced by one pro-Israel group in response to Israel Apartheid Week, a global pro-Palestinian event that began on March 1 and featured events on some 14 university campuses across the United States. The poster showed a drawing of a human posterior…
Read an update to this story here. A prominent Orthodox rabbi who recently granted rabbinic ordination to a woman is coming under fire from top ultra-Orthodox religious authorities, and now is said to be engaged in negotiations with the country’s mainstream Orthodox rabbinic association over the issue. Rabbi Avi Weiss’s decision in January to confer…
