When AgriProcessors, America’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, was caught on tape conducting what a federal agency later called “acts of inhumane slaughter,” officials at the plant knew they had been infiltrated by undercover investigators. What the company didn’t know was that two of those infiltrators were a married couple who keep kosher themselves. Meet Hannah and…
NEWS ITEM: Former New York City mayor Ed Koch has purchased a burial plot in an Upper Manhattan cemetery operated by Trinity Church. He wants to remain in Manhattan forever, he asserts. The mayor thoughtfully explains He wants his bodily remains To rest within the burg he loves. Should we extend him Mazel Tovs? In…
Barack Obama took off the gloves in going after his longtime pastor over his appearance yesterday at the National Press Club: Here’s a short snippet: When he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS, when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest…
There will be no replay of the infamous Durban conference. After months of quiet lobbying from Western governments and United Nations officials, African countries announced last week that their continent would not host the follow-up meeting of the controversial anti-racism conference that was held in South Africa in 2001. That meeting was marred by anti-Israel…
ISRAEL U.N. AMBASSADOR GILLERMAN AND HIS WIFE HOST INTIMATE LUNCHEON “I’m the man who accompanied Janice to New York,” joshed Israel’s United Nations ambassador, Dan Gillerman, addressing the guests at the Intimate Lunch he and his wife hosted March 13 at their Fifth Avenue residence. “When I took the job five years ago, I was…
Senator Hillary Clinton captured 62% of Jewish voters in Pennsylvania on her way to defeating Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama in the Keystone State’s April 22 primary. The win represents Clinton’s strongest showing among Jewish Democrats, aside from an earlier contest in her home state of New York. While the Pennsylvania results do little to alter…
A rabbinic legal opinion stipulating that Jewish employers should pay their workers a living wage is exposing fault lines in the Jewish world over attitudes toward labor issues. The opinion, which will be voted on by Conservative Judaism’s halachic policy body in late May, argues that rabbinic law obligates Jewish employers to pay their workers…
Los Angeles – Last October, a top Yiddish literary journal based in Los Angeles celebrated the publication of its 150th issue. Now it appears that its sesquicentennial issue may have been its last. Heshbon, the crowning jewel of L.A.’s once-vibrant Yiddish literature scene, will more than likely cease publication in the wake of the resignation…
I stood beside the road with a traveling backpack and a yarmulke, my arm extended, hitchhiking to the junction from Ramat Raziel to catch a bus home. I was singing “Lev Tahor,” a verse from Psalm 51 meaning “pure heart” that I’d been singing all Sabbath long. A car stopped, and a bearded man in…
Washington – Shortly after becoming the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee last month, Rep. Howard Berman presided over the highly anticipated testimony on Iraq of David Petraeus, head of American forces in Iraq. With major television networks carrying the event live, and much of Washington tuned in to the proceedings, Berman stunned those…
Los Angeles – For Sarah Sela-Herman, an Israeli doctor, it took moving to Los Angeles from Haifa for her to finally undergo one of contemporary Jewish life’s most prominent rites of passage: a bat mitzvah. Sela-Herman, a 47-year-old pediatric gastroenterologist who celebrated her bat mitzvah in January, is among a growing group of Israelis who…
