The garden I share with my friends, Karen and Kate, has a tomato jungle. The three plants have over run three concentric layers of “cages.” They’re now trying to colonize the carrots. Unrelenting weeks of sun and heat have battered our 10 by 14 foot plot in Karen’s backyard. LA’s water rationing has taken its…
Philadelphia – May, 1986. I’m walking down my college’s main thoroughfare, having just finished the very final final exam of my senior year. It’s late afternoon, and as I head toward my off-campus apartment, I come upon a street vendor selling shiny, green Granny Smith apples. I hand the man a quarter, and wipe the…
When Rahm Emanuel was first tapped by President-elect Obama to be his chief of staff, Jews kvelled. Amid uncertainty and anxiety in some quarters over Obama’s views toward Israel, the selection of the son of an Israeli veteran of the pre-state Irgun militia as the White House chief of staff offered some reassurance. Since then,…
NEWS ITEM: New York City is spending nearly $1 million on new typewriters for its Police Department. Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed shock at the purchase. “Why are they using any is the question you should ask, and where do you find them?” the mayor said. “That was the thing that I thought about. I didn’t…
SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME HONORS MUSICMAKERS FOR THE AGES The musical “Rags,” with a book by Joseph Stein, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, closed shortly after I saw it August 23, 1986. In my Forward tribute to this work about the Jewish immigrant experience, I wrote that the audience kept shouting…
Six months ago, Ronen came to the United States from Israel on a life-or-death mission. He needed a kidney transplant, or he would die. Soon after he arrived and moved into a donated basement apartment in Brooklyn, a man approached him and offered to give him what he wanted most in the world — for…
An unlikely alliance of settler leaders on the right, Arab parties on the left, student groups, Likudniks and many others across the political spectrum has united to scuttle a plan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to privatize state-owned land. Despite the vastly different beliefs of the various opponents, for all of them it was a…
It was during a midnight repast of shrimp couscous at a gay bar in Tel Aviv that I discovered Israel’s Foreign Ministry does not reimburse diplomatic staff for non-kosher, work-related meals in Israel. But that was just the beginning of my problems. A spokesman for the ministry informed me of the non-reimbursement policy as we…
A few days after my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Harold the plumber came to fix my parents’ toilet. Mom told Harold about the cancer. Harold told Dad that surely it was Jesus who had sent him to fix the toilet, to help my father get right with him before he died. Dad didn’t…
A standoff is simmering at a summer camp run by a Hasidic sect that is defying a mandatory “Order to Evacuate” issued by New York State for numerous safety violations. Homowack Lodge, located in Sullivan County, N.Y., about 70 miles northwest of New York City, was once a premier Borscht Belt resort. Like so many…
When the Forward Association launched the weekly paper in 1995, it joined a crowded media market of two dozen Russian-language newspapers in the New York metro area alone and grew to be the third-largest in circulation. It was an outspoken Jewish voice in the Russian-speaking community, when only one other publication, the Lubavitch-affiliated paper, identified…
