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A Holiday Poem
23 Elul 5761 (September 11, 2001) accompanying the rumble of burning jet fuel and fatiguing metal echoes in skyscraper ravines first responders sirens wailing from all directions apocalyptic cacophony earlier that morning shofrot blaring from the four corners of the City annual heralds of the coming Judgment Day (It is customary to blow the shofar…
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Ringing In the New Year, in Cantorial Style
Jeremiah Lockwood stepped onto the small stage at a dimly lit bar in Brooklyn a few weeks ago and immediately summoned the audience’s attention with his unabashed gusto and fervor. He seemed a man with a mission. His band, The Sway Machinery, performed his arrangements of traditional cantorial music, and Lockwood belted out Hebrew lyrics…
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Havdalah Hustle’s Healthier Holiday
Two-day Yom Tovs are decadent enough, but double-day holidays that run into the Sabbath are nothing short of gluttonous. This fall, observant Jews are facing a series of three-day festivals that will surely result in marathon large meals, loosened pants and discarded belts. But one group of New Yorkers living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side…
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Get Your Obama-kah!
Campaign Confidential is easing back into desk life after 13 days in the wilds of Maine and looking ahead to High Holidays. To wit: Jewish supporters of Obama are pushing the “Obama-kah” to those who may want to wear their politics on their heads while listening to the sound of shofar.
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Tribute to Leona
Was it selective amnesia on the part of the New York Post’s gossip maven Cindy Adams? Her August 21 column, “Unknown Stories of the Queen of Mean,” savaged her onetime friend Leona Helmsley (nee Rosenthal), who died the day before at age 87. The unforgivable sin of all sins that enraged Adams was Helmsley’s ousting…
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Jerusalem Plans a Hero’s Burial for Long-Deceased Grandson of Herzl
In one of the stranger commemorations planned for Israel’s upcoming 60th birthday, a man’s body will be disinterred in Washington, D.C., and moved halfway around the world to Jerusalem. The body being moved is that of Stephen Norman, the only grandson of the modern Zionist movement’s founder, Theodor Herzl, and the only descendant of Herzl…
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Armenian Genocide Crisis Tests Tight Ties Between Turkey and Israel
Turkish, Israeli and American Jewish officials held frantic consultations in the past week in an effort to defuse a diplomatic crisis prompted by the Anti-Defamation League’s recent description of the Ottoman massacre of Armenians during World War I as “tantamount to genocide.” Senior Israeli and American Jewish officials went out of their way to restate…
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Bid To Let Land Lie Fallow Finds Fertile Soil
Jerusalem – As occurs every seven years, religious Jews in Israel are grappling with the biblical commandment to let their land lie fallow. But this year there are some added complications. The sabbatical year, which begins next month, has traditionally been handled by buying produce from non-Jews. In past years, much of the substitute produce…
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Orthodox Call on Sinners To Give Chickens a Fairer Shake
What happens when a ritual designed to remove sin might itself generate sin? That was the thorny question asked by rabbis who met in Brooklyn earlier this month in preparation for this year’s High Holy Days. The ritual in question is kapparot, a practice generally performed during the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur…
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Families Mourn as School Abruptly Closes
As the Conservative movement is seeking to reenergize its ranks, a swath of its members is mourning the sudden loss of the New York City area’s only Conservative Jewish high school. Less than two weeks before the Metropolitan Schechter High School in Teaneck, N.J., was set to begin the academic year, the board announced to…
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Good Enough Parent
In our tradition, we often compare God to a parent, and ourselves to clueless, wayward children. Our expectations about God’s parenting can teach us a lot about our own responsibilities as Godlike figures (uh, sometimes) to our own children. As Rosh Hashanah approaches and we begin the introspection and self-inventory that are as much a…
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