The delicate relationship between Jewish ethics and Jewish ritual might seem like a topic for careful rabbinic disputation, but lately, the arguments coming out of the pulpit have sounded more like a bare-knuckled brawl. Over the past few weeks, the debate spurred by labor conditions at the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse has reached a fevered…
Tel Aviv — Incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank have surged in recent weeks, according to several new reports, prompting unusually sharp complaints from senior Israeli army field commanders as well as from villagers and human-rights groups. Settler leaders told the Forward that the incidents are part of a new…
PAUL LECLERC, PRESIDENT OF N.Y. PUBLIC LIBRARY, HONORED BY ISRAEL’S OPEN UNIVERSITY “We are all aware [that] the primacy of the book and other forms of print material — newspapers and magazines — is seriously challenged today,” said Paul LeClerc, president and CEO of The New York Public Library and honoree at the June 16…
The two-mile stretch of West Devon Avenue in West Rogers Park, Chicago, is perhaps the most modest route around to travel the world in a single afternoon. During the postwar period, the neighborhood was the center of Eastern European and Jewish life in Chicago, but its ethnic heart has since moved decidedly east to the…
Danya Ruttenberg breaks for kitsch. Weeks after receiving her rabbinic ordination in the spring, Ruttenberg and her husband embarked on a road trip to explore, in her words, “all of the fun, crazy, outrageous stuff that you don’t see when confined to the coasts.” Stops included the theme park resorts of Las Vegas; the…
A few months ago I got into an elevator in one of the new glass towers that dot Beijing’s Central Business District, joining two Chinese men and a foreigner for the ride down to the lobby. As we descended, the three men began talking, and for a second I thought my ears were deceiving me,…
Ted Solotaroff, who died August 8 at the age of 80, was, among his many literary virtues, a good writer of obituaries. He had his finger on the pulse of his era, and the press could count on him to sum up the lives and works of key literary figures — Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro,…
Washington — Rep. Steve Cohen was all smiles after resoundingly winning his August 7 primary in Tennessee, but it was hardly a pleasant campaign for the freshman Democrat. A white Jewish incumbent representing a predominantly black Christian constituency, Cohen defeated Nikki Tinker by a 4-to-1 margin, despite efforts by his black opponent to insert race…
It’s no surprise that Jews from Brooklyn to Berkeley get a thrill out of seeing their fellow Yids competing for and winning medals at the Olympics. In Judaism, 10 Jewish men (and women) usually form a minyan, rather than a team. So it was only a matter of time before the more irreverent of the…
THE OPERA “BRUNDIBAR” AND “DIARY OF ANNE FRANK” EXCERPT SHOWCASED AT AN ‘ISRAEL AT 60’ CONCERT AT USDAN CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS The July 17 “Israel at 60 Concert of Remembrance & Celebration,” held at Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, provides reassurance that the children who perished in the Holocaust will…
I made mozzarella cheese last night. This is not a shechechiyanu moment – I’ve done it before, using this, highly recommended, cheese making kit. But every time I accomplish the feat of turning a gallon of milk into two fistfuls of salty, stretchy, kosher cheese, it feels rather profound. It also feels a little wasteful,…
