The offices of union boss Bruce Raynor were, until recently, a physical testament to the Jewish labor movement’s enduring power. Raynor, president of the historically Jewish garment unions, worked from an executive suite in Manhattan’s garment district, in a storied building that had been purchased with the dues of countless seamstresses and furriers and milliners…
The stage looks set for a war over the future of Kadima, in which party leader Tzipi Livni could be forced to defend her leadership and the unity of the party. She appears to be open to attack on two fronts. The first is political, with the more hawkish Shaul Mofaz — runner-up in last…
Can visits to Ellis Island, Yankee Stadium, Manhattan’s 96th Street Mosque, Yeshiva University, the White House and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — among other American landmarks — give Jewish and Muslim leaders from Europe a model that not only will help them combat antisemitism and Islamophobia, but also instill within them a vision…
Four years ago, author Ayelet Waldman wrote in a New York Times essay, “I love my husband more than my children.” And she was pilloried. In May, she came out with “Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace,” a new bestselling book from Doubleday that extolls the virtues…
Twelve years of activism by Jewish groups is nearing an end as Congress prepares to approve legislation that would expand the definition of hate crimes to include actions based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender or disability. Jewish groups have been front and center in lobbying for the inclusion of these categories in the existing…
Gary Katz has seen the future, and he desperately wants to prevent it from happening. He predicted that “every cemetery that’s filled with Jews” and “looks nice” now will one day “look like Bayside,” a graveyard in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens that fell into disrepair and has become the focus of a years-long…
The new owner of the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, whose bid of $8.5 million for the troubled kosher meatpacking plant was accepted by a federal bankruptcy court judge July 20, is stepping into a business, and an industry, that has weathered changes under a harsh spotlight in recent years. Agriprocessors was bought at auction…
By the time Hans Krása was 22, his composing career was already off to an auspicious start. In 1921, his “String Quartet” premiered in Paris to rave reviews that compared him with Schoenberg and Bartok. The Prague native had made his professional debut the year before, with “4 Orchesterlieder – Op. 1.” After that, Austrian…
The soft-spoken Welsh writer and news correspondent Matt Beynon Rees acknowledges that he never intended to make the Middle East his home. But Rees (no relation to this writer), Time Magazine’s former bureau chief in Jerusalem and now the author of three Palestinian detective novels, might be the first to admit that his own career…
Zev Chafets grew up a Detroit Tiger’s fan alongside a Yiddish-speaking uncle who taught him that Hank Greenberg’s team was the Jews, and that their adversaries were the “goyim.” Since then, he has moved to Israel, where he worked in the administration of Menachem Begin, and back. He reported for the New York Times and…
Punk rock’s most revered founders include a yeshiva alum named Tamás Erdélyi and a Bronx Jew known to his family as Richard Blum. No, they weren’t managers, producers or label honchos; Erdélyi and Blum are living legends of the mid-1970s punk rock scene, widely celebrated for their bands’ revolutionary three-chord masterpieces. Both men are also…
