The idea for best-selling author Hope Edelman’s latest book was born as she sat in bed during the weeks leading up to the birth of her second daughter. With her swollen feet needing some tender loving care, a toddler scrambling around and a husband keeping long hours at the office, Edelman wished she could do…
The world of the theater lost a peerless artist last week. Yiddish actress Luba Kadison Buloff passed away on May 4 in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side at the age of 99. Born in 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania, the last surviving member of the renowned Yiddish theater company the Vilna Troupe, she was…
Ehud Olmert (Kadima), Prime Minister: The ex-mayor of Jerusalem who filled Ariel Sharon’s post when the former prime minister was crippled by a stroke in January, Olmert lacks Sharon’s military pedigree but is considered a shrewd politician. A scion of the long-dominant Likud party, Olmert was quick to follow Sharon when the former premier left…
A look at the four parties and 25 political players with a seat at the new Israeli power table. Ronnie Bar-On (Kadima), Minister of the Interior; Ze’ev Boim (Kadima), Minister of Immigrant Absorption; Ya’acov Edri (Kadima), Minister without portfolio (responsible for liaison with the Knesset); Gideon Ezra (Kadima), Minister of the Environment; Shaul Mofaz (Kadima),…
Six years after becoming the first openly gay leader of a Jewish federation, Harold Goldman is retiring from his chief executive post in Philadelphia — without anyone following in his footsteps. At the end of June, Goldman, 63, is giving up his post as president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. He will be…
When the World Pride gay festival kicks off in Jerusalem in August, Philadelphia’s Jewish community will be the only one in the United States to send an official delegation. Several gay synagogues across the country are sending groups to the festival, which was originally planned for August 2005 but was pushed back to this summer…
One can’t help but be tickled by the spectacle of the Satmar Hasidim tearing themselves apart these days in the battle between two brothers, Aaron and Zalman Teitelbaum, to inherit the title of grand rebbe from their father, the late Moses Teitelbaum. The Satmars, said to be the world’s largest Hasidic community, have a long…
Jews are said to have arrived in Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia, in 586 BCE, following the destruction of the First Temple. Tradition has it that they brought with them a stone from the destroyed edifice, on top of which was built the synagogue known as El-Ghriba, or “the wondrous.” Although the current structure…
As readers of the Forward know all too well, the modern world is no stranger to antisemitism. Although an animus against the Jews of the West dates as far back as antiquity, one of the most notorious, pernicious and enduring of antisemitic tracts — “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — is actually an…
My grandmother Bessie was a Jewish communist. She read the Morning Freiheit from the day it was launched in 1922, and she held its long-time editor, Paul (Peysakh) Novick, in the kind of high regard that hasidim reserve for their rebbe. When the Freiheit folded in 1988, I offered my 94-year-old bubbe a subscription to…
Once again, Joan Braman returns to Der Vinkl with one of her impressive translations of English classics into Yiddish, This time, the poem is William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils.” Daffodils I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils;…
