As our rundown Mercedes puttered past the olive groves and wheat fields of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, our taxi driver, Mohammed, pulled off the dirt road to ask a shepherd for directions. “Do you know how to find David Dra’a?” I was skeptical that the Arab shepherd would be able to lead us to the tomb…
Last December, the blogosphere ignited over a culinary curiosity called the Bacon Explosion. Best visualized as a pork lover’s jellyroll, the dish calls for a weave of bacon wrapped around sausage and smoked on the grill. The original post on bbqaddicts.com received 835 comments (and counting), including one that read: “I feel sorry for the…
Chicago Public Radio recently interviewed the Forward’s Nathaniel Popper about his coverage of Jews and the labor movement as it relates to his recent article about a six-year-strike at the Congress Hotel on Chicago’s lakefront.
BACKSTAGE AT ‘IRENA’S VOW’ TOVAH FELDSHUH RECALLS BARBRA STREISAND “Barbra Streisand was very good to me,” Tovah Feldshuh told me recently backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where she stars in “Irena’s Vow.” It was my fourth viewing and her 101st Broadway tour de force performance in the role of Irena Gut Opdyke, a young…
A tide of red ink is coursing through the hallways and balance sheets of Jewish charitable organizations, leaving slashed programs, reduced allocations and large staff layoffs in its wake. But in the current economic and financial meltdown, the suites of top executives have in many cases stood on high ground, beyond the reach of the…
As the Obama administration deepens its outreach to the Muslim and Arab world, it faces the difficult task of countering Holocaust denial without reinforcing an increasingly popular anti-Zionist narrative that ties the legitimacy of the State of Israel to Jewish suffering in Europe. And as discussion of the Holocaust becomes more widespread, so does the…
Last summer, New York State Assemblywoman Marge Markey had lunch with Delaware State Senator Karen Peterson. On the menu: a strategy session on how Markey could successfully achieve passage of a bill that would make it easier for sexual abuse survivors to sue their molesters and the institutions that employed them. In 2007, Peterson got…
Salman Ahmad, M.D., knows that he is an unlikely rock star. Make that an unlikely rock star, klezmer jam-session collaborator, celebrity to the Muslim world and United Nations goodwill ambassador. Not bad for a kid from the suburbs of New York who earned his medical degree to please his parents. “I should not be doing…
It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news. The idea behind the paper’s June 10 special edition was…
A plan to memorialize gay male victims of Nazism amid a collection of memorial stones for Holocaust victims in a quiet half-acre patch of Brooklyn has provoked an outcry. New York State Assembly Member Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat whose many Orthodox constituents include numerous Holocaust survivors, has decried the planned addition as a distortion…
Israeli-Arab diplomatic sniping over the choice of a new head for the United Nations cultural arm, UNESCO spilled over into an unlikely arena recently, emerging unexpectedly as a sore point in Israel’s relations with the Jewish Diaspora. The UNESCO conflict now pits Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against some of the world’s best-known Jewish intellectuals…
