Under an overcast sky, nearly 100,000 New Yorkers turned out June 4 for the city’s 42nd annual Salute to Israel Parade. Along with the mayor, New York’s two senators, talk-show host Ruth Westheimer, and contingents from the city’s Jewish police and firefighter societies, marchers included almost 100 members of the Halachic Organ Donor Society; 12…
An e-mailer signing off as Shlomo writes: “A recent NPR broadcast (May 27, 2006) on the use of dog hair in cloth noted in passing that the word shmatte derives from a Catalan source. Jews in pre-1492 Spain were prominent in the dog cloth trade, it seems. Is Catalan actually the source of this Yiddish…
‘Tonight we celebrate the keyboard and the life of a man who didn’t just play it — he inhabited it,” said composer, conductor, pianist and emcee-tummler Marvin Hamlisch at the 23rd New York Pops Birthday Gala, 88 Keys for Skitch, held May 8 at Carnegie Hall. (Skitch Henderson, founder and musical director of the Pops,…
Been to a Jewish wedding of late? If you, like me, have had the good fortune to attend one recently, surely you’ll agree that one of its most striking features is the range of sounds emanating from the bandstand, from the upbeat strains of klezmer and Israeli music to the rhythms of Motown, the twang…
Eleanor Gordon Mlotek and Joseph Mlotek were compilers of a series of books published by the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring. One of these compendia is titled “Pearls of Yiddish Poetry,” the same title of a regular column in the Forverts. The following poem by Abraham Reisen is taken from the Mlotek compendium. The English version is…
I recently returned from a trip to Europe, where I observed a troubling analytical failure: the widespread refusal to consider Hamas’s January electoral victory beyond the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In reality, Hamas’s rise to power has global ramifications. It opens a new front for radical Islamism in its confrontation with the West and…
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration’s offer to open direct talks with Iran and reward Tehran if it stops enriching uranium is exposing a policy rift between neoconservatives on one hand, and the Israeli government and Jewish organizations on the other. Neoconservative analysts are blasting the administration, saying that holding talks with the Islamic regime would…
A group of Presbyterian activists is ramping up efforts to reverse their church’s policy advocating divestment from Israel, setting the stage for a showdown over the issue at next week’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). When the more than 500 national delegates convene June 15-22 in Birmingham, Ala., for the 217th General Assembly,…
As anger reverberates through Conservative Judaism in the wake of a downbeat farewell address last month by the retiring chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, concerns are mounting over a perceived leadership vacuum within the movement and the seminary’s ability to maintain its leadership position. The chancellor, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, addressing his final graduation ceremony…
JERUSALEM — The Israeli movements for Conservative and Reform Judaism are protesting disparaging statements made last week by the government minister in charge of religious affairs, Yitzhak Cohen of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, who dismissed non-Orthodox conversions as “virtual” and undeserving of ritual immersion in publicly funded ritual baths. Cohen told a reporter May 30…
In the wake of national debates about the teaching of evolution and sex education in the public schools, Christian conservatives in Kentucky are now mobilizing over the issue of calendar abbreviations. Activists, along with the governor and other state politicians, have accused the State Board of Education of attempting to drive Christianity from the classroom…
