Back as a bored Hebrew school kid in suburban Chicago, I passed the time by staring at the map of Israel that hung on every classroom wall in my synagogue. Although I’d never traveled there, I knew the shape and topography of the country remarkably well — the ironically shrimp-shaped swath of brown, ringed by…
February 23, Defender of the Fatherland Day, is a former Soviet memorial holiday celebrating those soldiers who fell defending red Russia in the Russian Civil War from 1918-1921. Today it has become a sort of Men’s Day (to compliment Women’s Day, which takes place on March 8). Although many Ukrainians don’t celebrate this holiday, our…
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we are getting apples in our CSA box on a weekly basis… still. We are also getting kale and collard greens on a weekly basis…still, but more to come on those in the future. Until now I associated apples with fall. Growing up here I didn’t really experience…
Having her jewelry in the limelight is nothing new for designer Loree Rodkin. But having it in the Smithsonian Institution is an entirely different matter. Rodkin, a former Hollywood talent manager who turned her jewelry-making hobby into a full-fledged business in 1989, found a fan base among the likes of Cher, Steven Tyler and Madonna….
Israeli entertainment just can’t seem to stop generating controversy at the moment. In recent days, we have had Holocaust survivors taking offense at a skit with Hitler looking for parking in Tel Aviv, Christians taking offense at a skit on Jesus and Mary, and now it is Muslims who have been insulted. Settler Natan Beshevkin,…
KATYN — WAJDA’S SEARING FILM MEMORIAL TO THE MURDER OF POLISH (AND JEWISH OFFICERS) BY THE SOVIETS Overloaded with Holocaust films? Here’s a change of terror: Comrade Stalin’s signing of the order to slaughter 15,000 Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn in the spring of 1940. What few know, and what is not articulated in…
In a report lambasting Israel’s conduct during its recent military offensive in Gaza, Amnesty International, one of the world’s most widely recognized human rights groups, has called on the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo on the Jewish state. The report demands an “an immediate, comprehensive arms embargo on all parties to…
Behind the headlines about the massive layoffs sweeping the Jewish world are experiences like that of Rochelle Mancini. Mancini worked at the American Jewish Congress for 23 years until December, when her employer learned that it had lost much of its endowment in the alleged Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff. A few weeks later —…
The Obama administration is moving ahead on its push to engage Iran, nearly concluding a review of its policies toward that country, and naming veteran Middle East diplomat Dennis Ross as a special adviser. As the American approach toward Iran takes shape, Israel is trying to ensure that America’s talks with Tehran are conducted only…
It was a typical crowd for a Yeshiva University student event: long skirts and long sleeves for the girls, yarmulkes and tzitzis for the boys. But the January lecture featured no rabbi. And the topic was hardly typical Torah fare. Behind a lectern decorated with the university’s blue flag, Barry Gibbs, a burly Jewish Vietnam…
America’s oldest Jewish publisher has embarked on a project to bring the study of Judaism’s most ancient texts into the digital age. The Jewish Publication Society, a 120-year-old organization devoted to publishing ancient and modern texts on Jewish subjects, has begun work on a project to publish the Jewish Bible, or Tanakh, as an electronic,…
