In the course of rearranging my office a few years ago, many months after the Sukkot holiday, I opened an etrog case kept on a high shelf. Inside, I was delighted to find an exquisitely shriveled specimen of the fruit. As a result of forgetting to dispose of the citron, I felt as though I…
Yom Kippur stirs my strongest Jewish food memory – it’s strange, but true. Since I was in the single digits I can remember walking to Ne’ila services with my mother and father, carrying a bag filled with two essential components of our holiday inside. One was a three-pound sack of apples, the then ubiquitous McIntosh…
While a Yom Kippur recipe might seem like an oxymoron, there are many food traditions surrounding the meals immediately preceding and following the 25 hours in which most Jews refrain from food. Jews in Iraq, for example, frequently break the fast with a nourishing yet easily digestible glass of rice milk. I was surprised to…
The latest Republican attack line on Barack Obama involves a rabbi. The Republican National Committee is circulating a news release this morning calling the Democratic presidential nominee to task for awarding $75,000 in grants to a social service agency lead by his wife’s cousin, Rabbi Capers Funnye. The grants – $50,000 for adult literacy and…
There’s Jews for Obama, Rabbis for Obama, and now in the seemingly never-ending quest to address every possible demographic, there’s Jewish Moms for Obama. More specifically, it’s an Orthodox Jewish mom, who lived in Israel during the Second Intifada and the start of the Iraq War and now lives in Cambridge, Mass. with her husband…
Washington — Polling American Jewish voters, who are a tiny percentage of the overall population, is frequently compared to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Since it would cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to randomly call homes to find enough Jewish voters for a scientific survey, most polls compromise in some…
UPDATED: Congressman Mark Kirk’s pollster is calling a poll commissioned by the liberal Daily Kos blog flawed. The poll of the district with a large bloc of Jewish voters north of Chicago showed Kirk, A Republican, leading Democrat Dan Seals 44 percent to 38 percent among 400 voters surveyed. The poll had a 5 percent…
Several former Israeli Defense Forces and Mossad officials are saying that the pro-Obama group Jewish Council for Education & Research used their comments out of context and made the Israeli officials sound as though they were endorsing or supporting the Democratic presidential candidate. “It’s not only misleading, it was an interview about what the next…
Weighing in on the recent elections in Austria, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called for tolerance. Obama’s campaign released this statement on Sunday: “I am very concerned about last Sunday’s election results in Austria, in which two openly xenophobic far-right parties won nearly thirty percent of the vote. Extremism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism offend our most…
Republicans will garner more support from the Jewish community than at any time since the Great Depression – surpassing the 39 percent of the Jewish vote that Ronald Reagan won in 1980, U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., is predicting. The 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee who was on Republican John McCain’s shortlist for this year’s…
Dueling ads by the Republican Jewish Coalition and the National Jewish Democratic Council that have been gaining a lot of attention in the Jewish press are getting some mainstream attention. National Journal’s Ad Spotlight shines a light on this increasingly bitter fight for the Jewish vote.
