A bipartisan group of lawmakers is threatening a confirmation fight in an effort to press the Bush administration to reverse America’s longstanding policy of avoiding the use of the word “genocide” to describe the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to vote…
WASHINGTON — Jewish organization are seeking to mobilize the international community, through direct meetings with foreign diplomats and by lobbying the Bush administration, to impose sanctions on Iran for defiantly carrying on with its nuclear program. With the arrival of the August 31 deadline for Iran to stop its enrichment of uranium, pro-Israel groups are…
Democrats are hoping to swing several tightly contested congressional races by seizing on controversial comments made by Rep. Katherine Harris, best known for her role during the 2000 recount in Florida. Harris, who as Florida’s secretary of state was hailed by conservatives and reviled by liberals for her efforts to certify then-Texas Governor George W….
On July 12, the day that two Israel Defense Forces soldiers were kidnapped by Hezbollah, setting into motion Israel’s war in Lebanon, Rebecca Yale lowered the commemorative 9/11 flag she had flown alongside her Stars and Stripes and replaced it with the flag of the State of Israel. It was only a matter of weeks…
JERUSALEM — Jewish leaders of five different continents around the world headed to Israel this week to discuss what they described as the deteriorating security situation in their regions following the war in Lebanon. The New York-based World Jewish Congress, which organized the trip, issued a statement last week saying that the visiting Diaspora leaders…
With Democrats threatening to take back Congress in November, Christian conservative leader James Dobson has launched a multifaceted campaign to mobilize religious voters in eight battleground states. The effort, coordinated by Dobson’s Colorado-based group, Focus on the Family, will include church-based voter registration and education drives aimed at combating “voter apathy” and encouraging “Christians to…
Since the fall of communism, immigrants from the former Soviet Union have transformed the ethnic landscape of southern Brooklyn. Radiating out from Brighton Beach, known as “Little Odessa,” Russian-speaking immigrants — most of them Jewish — are a major presence in many areas of the borough. But one area in which the immigrants have yet…
SAN DIEGO — For the past 17 years, a concrete Latin cross that crowns a picturesque hilltop in La Jolla, Calif., has been the object of a convoluted local legal battle between the city of San Diego and an atheist who contends that the 29-foot monument cannot stand on public land. But this month the…
Iris Ovshinsky, co-founder of an influential alternative-energy company, drowned August 16 while swimming in a pond near her home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. She was 79. Ovshinsky was serving as vice president and director of the company that she and her husband, Stanford, founded, when her life was cut short. “We are greatly saddened by…
When Abe Newman and his partner, Craig Pollack, discussed the possibility of marriage, they decided that they wanted their ceremony to be infused with Jewish traditions. Last weekend, even though a friend who is not a rabbi officiated their ceremony in Massachusetts, they stood beneath a chupah and smashed not one but two light bulbs….
Life, Death & Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story By Dylan Schaffer Bloomsbury USA, 272 pages, $24.95. At 38, legal-thriller writer Dylan Schaffer had never baked a bialy. Though raised in New York — a mecca for seekers of the doughy Jewish treat — he’d long ago abandoned the state’s humid shores for California, land of…
