The UJA-Federation of New York, the world’s largest local philanthropy, has fired 52 people, 11% of its total staff. Federation CEO John S. Ruskay confirmed the layoffs to the Forward on March 11, the same day employees were notified. He said laid-off workers would receive severance and other forms of support, and would leave their…
Susan Ganc writes that she has three “grave matters” to ask me about — and when she says “grave,” she means grave, the kind you’re buried in. Let’s start with the first one. Recently, Ms. Ganc writes, she was reading, in Yiddish, Sholom Aleichem’s story “Khave” in his “Tevye the Dairyman,” and came across the…
The heat is on. With Passover looming on the horizon, home cooks everywhere have begun their annual quest for the perfect Seder meal. But with so much culinary energy dedicated to the first two nights of the holiday, one important detail tends to get overlooked: what to eat on the other six hametz-free days. The…
The spectrum of arguments against the appointment of Charles “Chas” Freeman to Washington’s top intelligence assessment post ranged from his approach toward China to his ties with Saudi Arabia to his views on human rights. But for Freeman, it was always about Israel. In a statement he released hours after withdrawing his agreement to serve…
Some of the most prominent figures in Conservative Judaism are demanding a meeting with the leadership of the movement’s congregational arm to discuss a major overhaul of the way the troubled movement functions. In a letter addressed to Ray Goldstein, international president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, a coalition of more than 50…
When attendees at a recent symposium on “Human Rights and Gaza,” sponsored by the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Near Eastern Studies, began chanting such slogans as “Zionism is Nazism,” it was not a typical scene for UCLA. While a handful of California campuses have notoriously grappled with heavy anti-Israel sentiment, at UCLA,…
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“VOICES FROM THE JEWISH DIASPORA” A MULTILINGUAL MUSICAL BANQUET Picture this: Beautiful Haifa, Israel-born mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham, in a décolleté gown, singing “Kaddish” (from “Deux Melodies Hebraiques,” set to music by Maurice Ravel). This was one of the unexpected delights of the February 10 New York Festival of Song’s “Voices From the Jewish Diaspora” program…
When Pooya Dayanim, a Los Angeles-based Iranian-Jewish activist, went public a decade ago with the case of 13 Jews jailed in Iran on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel, he based his strategy on that of the Baha’is, a religious minority long persecuted by the Iranian government. “When I decided to take the Shiraz 13…
The Jewish community’s main umbrella organization for domestic policy has struck a significant blow against internal resistance to dialogue with Muslims. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs adopted a resolution March 2, calling for local and national Jewish groups to build coalitions with Muslim Americans and to oppose anti-Muslim bias. “Jewish and Muslim Americans…should work…
In the short time that Barack Obama has served as America’s president, the organized Jewish community has been one of the young administration’s most solid bases of support for its liberal political agenda. But now, many of the major Jewish organizations are taking issue with a proposal that they fear will strike at their very…
דעבאָראַ בראָדי, אַ לערערין פֿון קינדער מיט ספּעציעלע באַדערפֿענישן, האָט זיי געלאָזט אָנטאַפּן די זאַכן.
