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Remembering Babi Yar
Writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko reads his renowned poem, “Babi Yar,” in commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the massacre in Kiev at a ravine called Babi Yar. On September 29 and 30, 1941, more than 30,000 Jews — along with Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies and underground fighters — were murdered by the Nazis. The event,…
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Islam and Fascism
Although the terms “Islamic fascism” and “Islamo-fascism” have been around for quite awhile, the public debate over both has been heightened by President Bush’s use of them in an August 7 press conference in Washington, D.C. At one point in this conference, the president mentioned “the jihadist message [of] Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism.” In another,…
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A Tribe of Candidates Leads Drive To Retake House for Democrats
More than a half-century ago, when Akiba Hornstein, the son of a Lithuanian rabbi, made his way from New York to the sunny desert of southern Arizona, he found himself, like many Jews in the hinterlands, in need of a name change. Soon, the state had a Gifford Hornstein. When, presumably, that moniker failed to…
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Democratic Hopefuls Find Religion on Campaign Trail
In an attempt to woo religious voters, Tennessee’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate has filmed a campaign commercial in his childhood church, with a large white cross looming over his right shoulder. “I started in the church the old-fashioned way… I was forced to,” said Rep. Harold Ford Jr., sitting in a glossy wooden…
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Liberal Rabbis Calling on Women To Take the Plunge for Ritual Purity
Top leaders of Conservative Judaism are promoting a plan to encourage female congregants to plunge regularly into a ritual bath, following the adoption last week of rabbinic guidelines by the movement’s central lawmaking body. At a September 13 meeting held in New York at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law…
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Paper on Labor Issues Falls Short in Conservative Vote
A rabbinic opinion calling on Jewish business owners to pay their workers a living wage and hire union employees was stymied by the Conservative movement’s top lawmaking body after the opinion received fewer than the minimum number of votes needed for a paper to be approved. At last week’s meeting of the Rabbinical Assembly’s 25-member…
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Ahmadinejad Draws Protests Throughout Trip to N.Y.
When he came to New York for his first United Nations General Assembly last year, the newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a virtual unknown. But in the past year he has become the international face of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and growing influence from Lebanon to Iraq, not to mention his calls for the…
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U.S. Groups Mostly Mum on Pope’s Remarks
One of Israel’s chief rabbis was quick to condemn the recent comments of Pope Benedict XVI on Islam, but American Jewish organizations were mostly silent. The Israeli Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, sent a letter written September 17 letter to Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a leading Sunni Muslim legal scholar in Qatar, in which he criticized…
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Concentration Camp Guard’s Secret Past Revealed
For decades, an elderly San Francisco woman kept her wartime stint as a Nazi concentration camp guard hidden from her family, including her late husband — a German Jew who’d fled the Holocaust himself. But time and the American government finally caught up with Elfriede Lina Rinkel, 84, who was deported to Germany this month…
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In Nashville, Hadassah Mulls Marriage Stance
With Tennessee voters set to decide in November whether to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage, the issue is creating tension between religious and political values for many women in Nashville’s Jewish community. The struggle played out last week as about 75 individuals, from both Hadassah and the community at large, turned out for…
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Trustee Faints at Y.U. Ceremony
A member of Yeshiva University’s board of trustees fainted Monday at a groundbreaking ceremony for a building named in honor of her parents. The ceremony was held for The Jacob and Dreizel Glueck Center for Jewish Study, which will be Y.U.’s first new building at the school’s campus in Manhattan’s Washington Heights area since the…
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