Rabbi Mordechai Yitzchok Friedman doesn’t care if his audience is listening or not — or even if it’s sentient. The video camera, perched on a tripod and recording his every paranoid thought, is on. That’s what matters. Once he is wound up, Friedman, who has convened this inaugural meeting of what he describes as the…
BRAVOS TO ‘BIG APPLE’ HONOREES AT NEW YORKER FOR NEW YORK AWARDS GALA! “This is going to be the most art-supportive administration since [Franklin] Roosevelt,” declared special guest Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, at the February 22 Citizens Committee for New York City black-tie New Yorker for New York Awards…
It’s hard to imagine what Dalia Carmel’s apartment once looked like. Her two-bedroom home on Manhattan’s East Side is so filled with cookbooks that most of the wall space is lined with shelves of them. But the 1,500 volumes that remain in her apartment are a fraction of what was once a 10,000-volume cookbook library…
Recently I was asked to participate in an art exhibit called “Cesarean Voices.” A call for submissions for the show, organized by the Baltimore chapter of the International Cesarean Awareness Network, explained that its aim is to “[educate] the public to the reality that cesareans can have profoundly negative physical and emotional consequences for women…
Attempting to draw attention to the fragile situation in war-torn Sudan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim activists descended on Capitol Hill March 2, armed with prayers — and nursery rhymes. The prayers were delivered during an interfaith breakfast in the Capitol and shared a common theme: They called on policymakers in Washington not to forget Sudan,…
Avi Gross Schaefer, a 21-year-old veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and a freshman at Brown University, was killed almost instantly February 12, after being hit by a car driven by a drunken driver. Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer and his wife, Laurie Gross, a prominent artist, have lost a son, and the wider world lost…
When Nisan and Gilan Gertz stepped off the plane at Ben-Gurion International Airport with their children last August, they were seven of almost 4,000 North Americans to make aliyah in 2009 — the largest number to do so in a single year since 1983. There were a lot of reasons that the Gertzes chose to…
While support for Israel in the United States is near an all-time high, the partisan divide in backing Israel’s approach to its conflict with the Palestinians is becoming more apparent. In a Gallup poll published February 24, 63% of respondents said they sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians in the conflict between the…
When senior Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh died in Dubai in mid-January, it was a year and one day since a loose de facto cease-fire had taken hold between Israel and Hamas with the end of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. That situation may now change — or, indeed, has already, if reports…
On Sunday, my daughter, Hannah (who’s almost three), had her first ballet class. When we arrived, Hannah was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, while all the other children wore pink leotards and tights. Hannah enjoyed the class and immediately asked for dance clothes. I thought we’d go buy them sometime during the week before the…
In this week’s podcast, Forward editor Jane Eisner has a roundup of the stories in the March 3 issue of the Forward; Allison Gaudet Yarrow interviews Justin Taylor, author of the new story collection “Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever,” about secular Jewishness in the American South, and the American Jewish World Service’s Ruth…
