Barnett Zumoff sat and peered through thick-rimmed bifocals at his latest book, “Songs to a Moonstruck Lady: Women in Yiddish Poetry,” as he flipped through the pages, trying to find a favorite poem. He already had found and read aloud two favorite poems — he has, he confessed, a lot of favorites — but he…
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…
On the 40th yahrzeit of poet Nokhem Yud (1887-1966), the Forverts devoted its column Pearls of Yiddish Poetry to this prolific and profound writer. His collective works filled 700 pages. One of his favorite subjects was Don Quixote, the “Man of La Mancha.” What follows is his poem on Quixote, transliterated into the Roman alphabet…
WASHINGTON — In the face of one of the harshest reports on the pro-Israel lobby to emerge from academia, Jewish organizations are holding fire in order to avoid generating publicity for their critics. Officials at Jewish organizations are furious over “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” a new paper by John Mearsheimer, a top…
We were seated, full from a sumptuous meal, around a dinner table: My wife and I, a retired professor of Russian literature and his wife, several other guests and our hosts. Two of the guests were having a political argument. “Koyl mir di genz,” one of them said. “What does that mean?” I asked. That…
Texas Two-step: A Jewish woman lawyer is poised to win a Democratic primary runoff and take on incumbent Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Barbara Ann Radnofsky was in New York City last week for campaign events, including a Women’s Campaign Fund cocktail party, a meet-the-candidate night at the Park Avenue home of Diane Chernoff…
If one more person says the words “Mommy Wars” to me I will clock them with a bottle of Enjoli. While I will not deny that there are women who judge other women’s choices and find them wanting (and these women, when they were girls, sauntered by your table in the lunchroom and said, “No…
President Bush suggested this week that Israeli security was a main reason for America’s effort to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. “The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel,” Bush declared, following a speech Monday in which he defended his administration’s Iraq policy. “That’s a threat,…
