A pathway used by many Jewish institutions to bring foreign religious and educational workers into the United States is tightening due to increased scrutiny from immigration authorities. The temporary work visas for the religious professionals program — which many Jewish institutions use to gain work permits for rabbis, ritual slaughterers and teachers — now requires…
When Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, delivers his Saturday-morning sermon at the group’s biennial conference, he sets the movement’s priorities for the coming two years. His message in Toronto this month was: Let’s eat like Jews. He was not asking Reform Jews to observe kosher laws. Rather, acknowledging America’s increased…
The opening of Britain?s brand-new Supreme Court last month was an occasion for celebration. But for some sections of Britain?s Jewish community, it was accompanied by trepidation. In a society with only partial separation between church and state, one of the first cases heard by the new court concerned the right of the Jewish community…
It has lately become fashionable to speak of Barack Obama with ? well, with regret. Such great hopes and expectations; so little so far. I write here not of the birthers and the tea partiers with their loathsome signs, not of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the others who trade in playing to people?s…
Life, John Lennon wisely observed, is what happens to you while you?re busy making other plans. For the latest evidence of that truth, consider the current moment in Middle East diplomacy. Only yesterday, it seems, the chatter was all about freezing settlements and whether a Palestinian state still can or should be established alongside Israel….
The floor of photographer Daniel Gordon?s studio is covered in colored shreds of paper. Here and there, an arm and leg made from those very scraps protrude from the rubble. One leg is covered in a sheath of thick gray hair that also turns out to be made of paper. There is something grotesque about…
Many of us know Chana Bloch as the translator of Yehuda Amichai, Israel?s most illustrious poet. In collaboration with Chana Kronfeld, she also recently translated Dahlia Ravikovitch, another iconic Israeli writer. Bloch?s own poetry, however, in her recent collection, ?Blood Honey,? engages Israel?s arch foil: the Diaspora. The poet delves into her Ashkenazic Jewish heritage…
The hip-hop bravado of Soulico, the Israeli DJ collective, comes with an undercurrent of adorable self-consciousness. Although the members are veterans of the business, they seem surprised by their breakthrough with an album and an American tour. Their affect is an excited, ?Can you believe it?? Because of the vibrant complexity they create, you shouldn?t…
Once underestimated in favor of his more acclaimed artist friends, like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890) is now finally the man of the hour, honored with two major exhibits: Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, which runs from November 15 to March 14, 2010, at…
At the end of last week?s column about the traditional use of Hebrew characters to write Jewish languages, like Yiddish and Ladino, I promised that this week?s column would deal with the opposite development ? namely, the growing tendency in America to write Yiddish in Latin characters. More and more, one finds Yiddish written that…
In the early 1970s, Marvin Zuckerman and Gershon Weltman, childhood friends from the co-ops of the Bronx, came across a rare Yiddish manuscript. Though they had never thought of putting out a book together, they quickly recognized that there was something in this document that made them want to take up the task of translating…
