In an 11th-hour decision following an emotional plea from parents and students, the board of the New York City area’s only Conservative Jewish high school voted to keep the financially strapped institution’s doors open for the near future. A Monday evening board meeting to decide the fate of the Metropolitan Schechter High School in Teaneck,…
Some 1,900 years ago, talmudic scholar Rabbi Akiva’s 24,000 students perished in a divinely decreed plague. To mourn, many observant Jews will not get a haircut, shave, wed or listen to instrumental music during the seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot. To a cynic, then, the proliferation of noninstrumental, or sefirah, music is a sneaky…
Henny Youngman had his wife, Sadie Cohen; Phyllis Diller has her husband, “Fang,” and Judy Gold has her mother, Ruth. Gold’s nervous and oft-negative mom provides consistent fodder for the stand-up comedian’s act. “She is constantly calling and asking me, ‘Where are my residuals?’” Gold said. In her one-woman show “25 Questions for a Jewish…
Only in the past three or four years have the words “iPod,” “mp3,” “podcast” and “bandwidth” crept into the modern-day lexicon, their specific meanings still eluding the general population. To the less audio-savvy, the current influx of Apple computer commercials on TV might seem to suggest that this new technology is meant for one thing:…
A fine day in Hollywood. Two white-robed and bearded gentlemen enjoy luncheon on the terrace of a movie studio commissary, when a third similarly dressed fellow in a fright wig stands on a nearby table and begins to rant about what evils will befall our errant kind. Malachi: Well, look who’s here. Ezekiel. Moses: Naw,…
Edgar Bronfman resigned Monday as president of the World Jewish Congress after years of turmoil at the organization. Bronfman, heir to the Seagram liquor fortune, resigned at a meeting in New York of the WJC’s steering committee. Bronfman had been president of the organization since 1979. During his tenure, the organization led the Jewish community’s…
Mormon GOP contender Mitt Romney delivered a commencement address at Pat Robertson’s Regent University on Saturday.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John F. Kennedy ousted CIA director Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell Jr., the agency’s Directorate for Plans. In a meeting with Bissell, the president said: “In a parliamentary government, I’d have to resign. But in this government I can’t, so you and Allen have to go.” Wonder what JFK…
…in France. Sort of. Meet Cecilia Sarkozy.
The Christian Science Monitor weighs in with this article.
Eliyahu Winograd has read out many judgments in his life. In Israeli history, however, the judgment for which the wizened former judge will be remembered is the one he read in a dry, steady voice on the last day of April 2007: the brief, harsh summary of his committee’s initial report on what went wrong…
