Has everyone gone to the Hamptons? Why aren’t Jews everywhere loudly outraged that health care reform is being compared to the extermination of six million people? One Jewish politico is breaking what seems like a deafening silence. In the video above, Massachusetts congressman and media darling Barney Frank is “calling on [his] ethnic heritage” (his…
The senior Israeli official’s tone was dire. In only a few years, the Iranians would be ready to launch a nuclear bomb. He minced no words. “If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years.” The year this apocalyptic prediction was…
Nowhere has the truism that politics makes strange bedfellows seemed truer than in New York’s 39th City Council district. The district takes in a wide swath of the liberal, gentrifying neighborhoods of Brooklyn’s Brownstone Belt, including Park Slope, a lesbian mecca and a hub of progressive Jewish life. But it also includes a slice of…
The battered image of Hadassah, the American women’s Zionist organization, may be harmed further by the disclosure earlier this month that its former chief financial officer was a mistress to Bernard Madoff — even as she sat on the committee that invested the charity’s funds with Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme. But worse news may…
I’m in the dressing room at Emporio, an Italian clothing boutique, in a city whose most famous landmark is Auschwitz. And I’m having a debate with myself. In question are two brightly designed shirts that together cost 25 American dollars: a downright steal. But I’m kept in the room by superstition: Does the historical trauma…
Taglit-Birthright Israel, one of the most widely praised Jewish communal programs, is facing a rare dose of criticism from within the Jewish world after deciding to hire a public relations company with big national clients — and a history of controversy. Birthright, which sends young Jews on free 10-day trips to Israel, has retained the…
In response to the July corruption arrests that swept up a number of rabbis on money-laundering charges, the Sephardic Community Federation is launching a program aimed at making religious charities more accountable and transparent. The goals are lofty, and leaders of the effort say they’re being well received in the Syrian Jewish community that was…
As the new rabbi at the Free Synagogue of Flushing, Michael Weisser faces a formidable challenge: revitalizing a historic synagogue in a neighborhood that has gone from being heavily Jewish to being populated almost entirely by Chinese immigrants. Luckily for his new congregation, Weisser is no stranger to accomplishing the impossible. When he was a…
The other night I had eggs for dinner. Two of them fried over easy, slipped onto a slice of toast and plopped next to some sautéed zucchini with garlic. My total cooking time clocked in somewhere around 12 minutes — about as much energy as I had on a muggy summer evening after a day…
I don’t remember the first time I saw a Katharine Hepburn film, but I’m sure it was sometime back when I was in what used to be known as junior high school. One of the local New York television stations was airing a classic movie every afternoon for a week, and I rushed home from…
NEWS ITEM: “The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism” — that’s the title of an anthology just published by New York University Press. It explores what the Torah has to say about sex. Provoking praise and some unease: A book about the birds and bees. What makes its publication news? It solely concentrates on Jews. This…
