The new head of Conservative Judaism’s congregational arm has asked his fellow rabbis to forgive him in a Sept. 17 letter apologizing for a recent interview with the Forward in which he said Conservative rabbis lack “missionary zeal,” and work instead “to get paid.” “I talked before I thought,” wrote Rabbi Steven Wernick, the United…
Uzbekistan-born diamond mogul Lev Leviev announced late in August that his company, Africa-Israel, was drowning in debt of more than $5.5 billion that it could not repay. Over the next two days, shares in the company’s stock plummeted by more than one-third. It was relentless bad news for one of the world’s richest men. His…
A celebrity face-off over Israel at the Toronto International Film Festival in September marked the latest skirmish in a long-percolating Palestinian effort to promote an artistic and cultural boycott of Israel. On one side, a lineup that included Viggo Mortensen, Wallace Shawn, Danny Glover, Julie Christie, David Byrne and Naomi Klein signed a protest letter…
When Daniel Sokatch was tapped last year to lead San Francisco’s Jewish Community Federation, he was heralded as a breath of fresh air in a federation world struggling to re-establish its relevance. Having made his name as the founder of the liberal Los Angeles-based Progressive Jewish Alliance, Sokatch was widely seen as a bold —…
Religious Jewish women, the primary cooks in Orthodox families, have long ruled kosher kitchens and served as crucial, informal kosher watchdogs for their families and guests. But those women are rarely trusted with the even more powerful, formal task of professionally supervising the production of kosher food. This may be starting to change. For the…
The city of Tel Aviv received flowers for its birthday — half a million blooms, to be exact. A gift from the city of Brussels, the 500,000 dahlias were flown from the Belgian capital September 16 as part of ongoing festivities to mark Tel Aviv’s 100th anniversary, a celebration that kicked off in early April…
Each year, the day before he was to ordain them as rabbis, Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk told students at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion about an experience he had as a young boy in Oberwesel, Germany. The day after Kristallnacht, the November night in 1938 when the Nazis rampaged through synagogues and…
One of the perks of fighting antisemitism for a living is the occasional opportunity to meet a genuine hero. On September 12, one of those heroes — a largely unsung one — died at age 53 alone in a motel room in Santa Fe, N.M., after a long battle with Crohn’s disease that had left…
In an annual tradition, the staff of this newspaper compiles a list of the 50 people who have made an imprint in the past year on the ways in which American Jews view the world and relate to each other. Last year, for the first time, we invited you, our readers, to send us your…
FRENCH FILM STAR JULIETTE BINOCHE DAZZLES AS ARTIST, POET, AND NOW DANCER Not until after I had met the stunning French film star Juliette Binoche at the September 9 preview of the exhibition of her latest book, “Portraits In-Eyes” at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy did I learn of her maternal grandparents’ imprisonment…
Even before Jeremy Danneman had a chance to tuck the reed into his saxophone, people began to gather around him. As he strapped on the instrument and began to play, he recounts, a large crowd of shoppers at the marketplace of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, abandoned their errands and circled around him. In this East Central…
