When disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff showed up for court in a black fedora, critics attacked him for hiding behind his Orthodox Judaism. In the end, however, religion may have proved to be his best defense. Abramoff, who pleaded guilty recently to felony charges in Washington and in Florida, received the lightest sentence possible in the…
Are you so sick of me meditating on how having small children changes the nature of everything? Well, too bad. It does! It’s like going through life thinking that something was solid, and suddenly you discover it’s a gas. Passover is a case in point. For decades we had My Zayde’s Seder (aka “humminah-humminah-humminah,” the…
When the Orlando Jewish community held a “Stop Iran Now” rally at the city’s Reform synagogue on March 14, the guest speaker was Brad Gordon, director of policy and government affairs of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In addition to warning against Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and its terrorist prowess, Gordon noted that pension funds…
Readers of Der Vinkl need no introduction to Joan Braman, whose clever translations of English classics into Yiddish have graced our column often. She is with us again, in a translation of a sonnet by John Keats. Bright Star Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art — Not in lone splendour hung aloft…
Hitkansut. (Hit-kahn-SOOT.) Keep an eye out for it. It’s already a much bandied about and argued about Hebrew buzzword, and it’s going to become even more of one. It’s not an easy word to translate. According to the context, it might be rendered in English as “getting together,” “rallying round,” “gathering oneself” or “withdrawing into…
“My name is Guillermo Bianco. [Tonight] we are all Italians and welcome you,” Intrepid Foundation President Bill White proclaimed at the March l Intrepid Freedom Award dinner honoring Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Among the 1,000 black-tie and uniformed guests aboard the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum were Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman;…
most people agree that the future of yiddish depends on cultivating a new generation of young people who speak and read the language. In response to the glaring shortage of contemporary reading material for today’s students of Yiddish, the Forverts has begun publishing a monthly news supplement called Vayter (a synonym for “Forward”), written in…
Arsonists struck a building near Texas’s San Antonio Airport that houses the Holocaust History Project, a Web-based archive of documents related to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. The fire destroyed 2,000 books related to the Holocaust, a number of backup servers and a pair of military uniforms worn by a judge at the Dachau…
Dr. Jose Miller, president of Cuba’s tiny Jewish community, died February 27 at age 80. Eddie Levy, chairman of the South Florida organization Jewish Solidarity, told the Miami Herald: “If there is a Jewish community in Cuba, it’s because of his leadership. It was his job, his work, his life.” Miller was born in Sancti…
Born in Russia in the 1930s, Zhenya Greshes didn’t grow up “religious.” But she did grow up “Yiddish,” speaking the language at home, attending Yiddish schools, reading Yiddish newspapers. After fleeing with her family to Cuba, and then fleeing again to America in the 1960s, Greshes settled in Atlanta. While America became her new home,…
John Mearsheimer says that the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and co-author Stephen Walt would never have been able to place their report in a American-based scientific publication. “I do not believe that we could have gotten it published in the United States,” Mearsheimer told the Forward. He said that the paper was…
