Almost 80 years ago, Al Jolson captivated movie audiences with “The Jazz Singer,” a semi-autobiographical tale of a young singer who forsakes a career as a cantor to make it on Broadway. These days Jolson’s story has undergone an unlikely rewrite in Las Vegas — where three of the city’s largest synagogues boast cantors who…
TEL AVIV — Although the signs were visible well before Israel’s March 28 elections, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz refused to believe that his term at the helm of Israel’s most sensitive ministry was actually drawing to a close. “I don’t believe he [Prime Minister Ehud Olmert] would give up on me,” Mofaz told the Forward…
A leading Jewish civil rights organization is warning that white supremacists are using the heated public debate over immigration reform to target Hispanic immigrants and to foment anti-Latino violence. This week, in conjunction with its annual national leadership conference in Washington, the Anti-Defamation League issued a report documenting an increase in anti-Latino rhetoric on the…
WASHINGTON — Moshe Yaalon, the recently retired chief of staff of the Israeli military, is a kibbutznik from a Labor movement background. But in sharp contrast to the retired military men entering the next Knesset, Yaalon is the rare, and arguably most important, retired Israeli general to publicly oppose unilateral Israeli withdrawals from the West…
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, who died this week at 84, had an enormous capacity for friendship and generosity. But at the heart of everything he did was an unbending moral standard that he applied to everything and everyone he knew. The sharpness of Hertzberg’s mind was legendary among his acolytes, among whom I was honored to…
The fight to reclaim artworks stolen by the Nazis is pitting the granddaughter of a Holocaust victim against her father’s estate and its main beneficiary, a mental health clinic. At issue are the paintings that belonged to the late Heinrich Rieger, a dentist who lived in Vienna before World War II and bartered with patients…
U.N. Moves Criticized Just as far-reaching negotiations to reform the United Nations are under way and expected to reach their climax in the coming months, Jewish groups are denouncing two recent decisions as proof that such overhaul is needed. On Monday, the American Jewish Congress called the selection of Iran to a leadership position on…
WASHINGTON — Israeli officials this week denied press reports that individuals close to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were cooking up a deal in which imprisoned Fatah strongman Marwan Barghouti would be freed in exchange for the release by the Bush administration of Jonathan Pollard, the American naval intelligence analyst who received a life sentence in…
TEL AVIV — Mordechai Atar, who owns a vegetable stall near the site of Monday’s deadly suicide bombing in the city’s old bus station, says he has no plans to switch locations. “I’m already used to terror attacks here,” said Atar. There was another bombing nearby just last January, and he survived then, too. Now,…
Despite the refusal of official Hamas representatives to condemn Monday’s terrorist attack in Tel Aviv — the Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, called it “a legitimate act of self-defense” and said Israel must take responsibility for its policy of “aggressive occupation” — the timing of the attack is most inconvenient for the militant…
Bernard Adelman from Winthrop, Mass, writes: “How does one derive [the Yiddish plural noun] ‘scotsim’ from [the singular] ‘sheygetz,’ when it seems that ‘scotsim’ would be the plural only of ‘scots’? Sheygetz, of course, is a Yiddish word referring either to a young gentile male, or else to a young Jewish male who behaves like…
