Maxine’s a fresser. I seem to remember her first word as “mama,” but both Jonathan and our baby sitter insist that I am delusional. Her first word was “cheese.” This kid will pretty much eat anything. Kiwi, stinky Stilton, dal, smoked whitefish, oily lox, spicy tofu and bitter greens with Thai fish sauce. She loves…
After months of mobilizing for what has been described as a major effort to stop an unfolding genocide, planners of next week’s national action for Darfur are now speaking in measured terms of a radically more modest effort. Leaders of the main effort, scheduled for April 30 in Washington, were reluctant to offer projections of…
Once again Joan Braman graces the pages of Der Vinkl with her Yiddish translations of a famous English poems. This week she turns to a selection from a work by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Jewish Cemetery at Newport The very names recorded here are strange, Of foreign accent, and of different climes; Alvares and Rivera…
WASHINGTON — Following a threat this week by Palestinian militants to target “Zionists outside Palestine,” a national Jewish community terrorism alert system has been activated to determine whether Jewish institutions should take extra security precautions. “Our Secure Community Network people have been in touch with law enforcement officials and are on top of” possible implications…
Ehud Olmert is in a hurry. Call it bicycle politics: If he goes too slow, he’s likely to fall. Even as he tries to patch together a ruling coalition, Israel’s prime minister-designate has said that he plans to carry out a second disengagement — this time from a large swath of the West Bank —…
LAS VEGAS — When Barry Kroot and his brother signed away the deed to their family’s scrap metal yard last month, they joined a new Jewish exodus. Like many other scrap metal businesses in America, K&F Industries got started when a relative (in this case, Barry’s grandfather) came from a Polish shtetl to small-town America….
The sole reparations program devoted to Romani, or Gypsy, Holocaust survivors ran out of funds at the beginning of this month, leaving tens of thousands vulnerable to starvation and extreme weather. For the past four years, the International Organization for Migration has spent $32 million providing emergency assistance to destitute Romani survivors of the Holocaust…
TORONTO — A Canadian Jewish organization initiated a Passover-timed billboard campaign to raise awareness about domestic violence, with the theme “There is a Jewish woman you know being abused.” Three 10-by-20-foot billboards, carrying that message beside an image of a distressed woman with a black eye, were strategically placed along Bathurst Street, the main thoroughfare…
A new qualitative study on interfaith families argues that it is a mistake to view converts to Judaism as a single class. In her new study, “Choosing Jewish: Conversations About Conversion,” Brandeis University Professor Sylvia Barack Fishman attempts to explain why non-Jews convert and how their conversions affect the wider Jewish community. She divides converts…
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…
