I’m sure that like me, many of you cannot get Hanukkah cooking and baking out of your minds! I will be making potato leek latkes, homemade apple sauce and some chewy ginger cookies tonight. As you can tell, I’m in full holiday mode! Anyway, if you are looking for a break from the holiday food…
This year Hanukkah starts and ends on a Friday night. This happy happenstance gives me two opportunities to create one of my favorite holiday treats — the challah hanukkiah, literally a menorah made of challah. For the most part Jews today associate the bread eaten Friday night with the braided form in which it is…
Lighthouse Shines Spotlight on Honorees That Include a Composer, Movie Star, Interior Designer and Cosmetics Packager Supreme “It’s a good news story… a change from cheating and scandal,” said WNYW FOX 5 news anchor Ernie Anastos, host of “Lightyears,” the November 10 Lighthouse International Salutes the Arts gala, held at the Plaza. The honorees were…
An August 2009 survey that found only 4% of Israelis believe President Barack Obama supports Israel has been haunting the White House and supporters of the president. The 4% figure became a symbol of Obama’s inability to communicate with the Israeli people and fostered the notion that the U.S. president is biased toward the Arab…
On a recent Saturday afternoon, after completing his Sabbath morning prayers, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut braved a four-mile, snowy walk to the Capitol building from his Georgetown synagogue. “I have a responsibility to my constituents, really to my conscience, to be here on something as important as health care reform,” Lieberman told the congressional…
When hundreds of thousands of Jews began leaving the Soviet Union 20 years ago, American Jews looked at them the way a father beams at his children. Here was a large part of the tribe, almost lost to forced assimilation, now taking their first steps into a Jewish future. That paternalistic feeling only grew, as…
Some of Conservative Judaism’s top leaders found little to criticize within their own movement when they gathered together December 7 for a panel discussion on the future direction of their troubled denomination. The plenary forum at the biennial convention of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism saw one panelist tout renewed involvement by rabbinic spouses…
Breaking with his previous restraint, Israel’s ambassador to the United States delivered an unprecedented blast against J Street, the new dovish Israel lobby that has made waves in Washington and throughout the Jewish community. Addressing a breakfast session at the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s biennial convention December 7, Ambassador Michael Oren described J Street…
On December 5, in Newcastle, England, Dmitriy “Star of David” Salita — born in Ukraine but raised, coached and tutored in Talmud in Brooklyn — stepped into the ring to fight Amir Khan, the Muslim “Pride of Bolton,” for the WBA light-welterweight title. On November 14, boxer and aspiring rabbi Yuri Foreman had won the…
Brooklyn’s district attorney has lost a key fight in his effort to keep the lid on details of how he has dealt with a high-profile sex-abuse case in the Orthodox Jewish community. A New York Supreme Court judge ruled November 23 that Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes must release documents related to the case…
Israel’s medical establishment is reacting angrily to revelations that the country’s Health Ministry is working on a plan to make Jerusalem’s two largest psychiatric institutions single-gender. The controversy marks the latest in a series of dust-ups over the place of religion in the health care system since the United Torah Judaism party took control of…
