Chicago — As part of its holiday show “Putting the Ha! In Hanukkah,” the musical comedy duo Good for the Jews is making its annual cross-country schlep — lampooning on stage such Jewish institutions as the bar mitzvah and JDate. Good for the Jews teams up Rob Tannenbaum, the creator of the band “What I…
It’s Rosenberg vs. Goldberg, and the world of classical music criticism is trembling. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s classical music critic Donald Rosenberg filed suit this month, several weeks after he was taken off the Cleveland Orchestra beat after writing about the ensemble for 18 years. Rosenberg’s suit names the newspaper and the Musical Arts Association,…
Legend would have it, two years ago the ADAMAH, Jewish Environmental Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, had an overabundance of cucumbers. One of the Fellows, Zelig Golden (also the co-chair of this conference) was unhappy with simply composting the unused vegetables and began making pickles from the extra veggies. Pickling is really…
It was standing room only as concertgoers filed into Congregation Shearith Israel, Manhattan’s Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, for an evening of traditional Sephardic song. The December 23 event, part of the 4th annual Sephardic Music Festival — December 21–28 in New York — offered a tuneful lesson in the long and varied tradition of the…
Note from the editor: In the spirit of the secular New Year, this week’s East Village Mamele column was written by Marjorie Ingall’s husband, Jonathan Steuer, who’s been waiting patiently to get a word in edgewise (on this page, that is) all year long. Yes, I’m officially one of *those people *now: I was just…
When it comes to finding food, the human species clearly prefers the supermarket to the forest. Nevertheless, foraging for edible wild plants has become increasingly popular among some dedicated foodies. The wild foods movement is led, in large part, by two members of the tribe: Russ Cohen of Arlington, Mass., and Steve Brill of Mamaroneck,…
San José Calderas, Guatemala — While working 15-hour days, six days a week at a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa where machines could chop off a finger at any moment, Marco Tulio relied on one thing to keep going: thoughts of his Guatemalan hometown of San José Calderas. He pictured his wife and children moving into…
Representatives of major Jewish foundations have agreed to offer millions of dollars in loans to not-for-profits hurt by the massive alleged Ponzi scheme of investor Bernard Madoff. But even with the announcement of this emergency intervention, additional organizations report being damaged by the scandal, and new information has emerged about those whose losses had already…
Washington — The audience was a receptive one at the Brookings Institution during a recent presentation on foreign policy recommendations for the incoming president. Experts explained in detail their view of the Bush administration’s blunders and how the Obama team should reverse almost every policy the outgoing administration has set in place over the past…
About a year ago, the owners of the Streit’s matzo factory, a pillar of Manhattan’s Lower East Side since 1925, announced that they planned to sell the building and move their operations to New Jersey. The family-owned company was asking $25 million for the factory building, a price that seemed realistic given the neighborhood’s white-hot…
Haifa — Florence Rouaux, a 28-year-old Jerusalemite who immigrated to Israel from Belgium in 2003, completed her conversion to Judaism three years ago. She went through the recognized channels, converting under the auspices of Israel’s state Conversion Authority. But in May of this year, crisis struck the Conversion Authority. Israel’s Supreme Rabbinical Court — which…
באַזונדערש רירנדיק דאָ זײַנען די בילדער פֿון משפּחה־רײַבונגען, פֿון באַגעגענישן װאָס ברענגען נישט צו קײן עמאָציאָנעלע פֿאַרשטענדיקונגען.
