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Conservative Judaism’s ‘Vision Thing’
Conservative Judaism, the centrist denomination that once dominated American Jewish religious life, faces a crucial juncture this spring in its quest to halt a lingering decline. The United Synagogue, the movement’s congregational arm, is set to hire a new executive officer, completing a wholesale generational change of guard in Conservative Judaism’s three major institutions. The…
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The Pope Blinked, And Jewish Leaders Assess What’s Next
As American Jewish leaders headed off to Rome for a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI on February 12, there was no doubt about what was at the top of their agenda. Just eight days earlier, in the face of public protests from world Jewry, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 50 Catholic members of Congress and even…
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Chavez Sends Mixed Signals on Synagogue Attack
Washington — Still roiling from the desecration of a Caracas synagogue, Venezuela’s small Jewish community is trying to make sense of the conflicting messages it is getting from the Chavez government. On one hand, the country’s leader, facing international criticism and pressure from Jewish leaders worldwide, has renounced antisemitism and moved quickly to make arrests…
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Orthodox University Slashes Jobs
Beset by financial losses, the flagship university of Modern Orthodoxy announced that it was laying off 60 employees, spread out across all of its undergraduate schools, in an effort to reduce its operating budget by nearly $30 million. In an announcement sent via e-mail February 9, Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel, wrote that the layoffs…
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Books Chagall’s Political Art
Suspended in white space, a goat romps and a rooster struts across a modest book cover. Beneath them, running right to left, is the Yiddish word “mayselekh” — less a title than a simple description of what’s inside: two little stories for children. The book, which is more like a pamphlet, is small enough to…
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Books Ruth Wisse: Generous Mentor, Worthy Adversary
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint and Rachel Rubinstein *Harvard University Press, 750 pages, $75. * In September 1976, Commentary printed the letters of three novelists who had taken umbrage at appraisals of their work, in…
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Theatrical Translations
It’s a funny thing, the way a young artist’s raw vitality is often forgotten in posterity, obscured by the seemingly tamer, more popularly appealing self that emerged later. Seven decades after “Our Town” was a Broadway hit, for example, almost no one remembers Thornton Wilder as an experimental dramatist, though he once was one. These…
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Books Women’s Work
Each month, a handful of New York feminists, who are also students of Yiddish, get together in each other’s homes to read the work of Yiddish women writers. Several writers, a couple of filmmakers and librarians, a culinary scholar and a singer/songwriter form the core of the group. Our population, however, expands and contracts, following…
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Books The Poetry of Language
There are many bilingual Jewish books in which the two languages are dependent on each other. The Gemara is a mostly Aramaic reworking of the Hebrew-language Mishnah. The stories of Reb Nachman of Breslov were told in Yiddish, but their first written versions were in Hebrew. The majority of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work is now…
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Books Kids Lit: More Yiddish Books Begin To Sprout
Let’s say you’re raising your children in Yiddish and you want to buy them some books. What do you do? If you walk into the children’s section of any bookstore, you’ll be deluged with a huge number of engaging, beautifully illustrated books, from board books to chapter books to beautifully rendered pop-ups. But none of…
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Books Book Center Goes Digital
Long faced with extinction, Yiddish literature has been preserved for the digital age with a newly activated online archive. Since the beginning of February, more than 10,000 titles have been available for browsing, skimming and study via the National Yiddish Book Center, an Amherst, Mass., collection that includes more than one million volumes that have…
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