APPRECIATION Mrs. Plumm, the dotty yet dignified housemother of a New England women’s college dormitory in Wendy Wasserstein’s early play “Uncommon Women and Others,” welcomes her charges to tea by reciting a poem by Emily Dickinson. “The Heart is the Capital of the Mind,” she intones. “The Mind is a single State. /The Heart and…
The pages of the Forverts devoted to Pearls of Yiddish Poetry recently featured Yankl Yankelovitch (1905-1938). His early death was no accident; Yankelovitch was a victim of Stalin’s campaign against Jewish intellectuals. What follows is the text of a poem that Yankelovitch wrote when he visited his mother’s tomb. The transliteration is by Goldie Gold….
The sudden collapse last week of the ceiling at the historic First Roumanian-American Congregation in New York should serve as a wake-up call to American Jews concerned with the preservation of their own heritage. Indeed, even before the roof fell in on the landmark Lower East Side synagogue, it was puzzling why historic preservation in…
‘We’re both from Down Under,” statuesque Nicole Kidman said as she presented the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Humanitarian Laureate Award — a shofar inscribed, “He who helps mankind” — to Rupert Murdoch at the center’s January 11 dinner, held at The Waldorf-Astoria. “No other person… is able to touch so many people of this world,” Kidman…
The budget reconciliation package that was expected to pass the House of Representatives on Wednesday contains a measure that could spell disaster for Jewish community-run nursing homes, Jewish communal officials said. Under the Republican proposal, seniors who have transferred assets to relatives would be barred from Medicaid coverage of their nursing home bills for a…
Worries among Jewish groups that President Bush would use his State of the Union speech to unveil a new push for faith-based funding or any other efforts to lower the church-state wall proved unfounded. In his address Tuesday night, Bush pressed a laundry list of domestic initiatives that widely are being described as small in…
An estimated 300,000 people marched through the streets of Jerusalem on Sunday — not to protest the Palestinian elections or to celebrate the Betar Jerusalem soccer team, but to join in the funeral procession for a famed Kabbalist, Rabbi Yitzhak Kadouri. Kadouri died last week, somewhere between the ages of 104 and 114 (no one…
WASHINGTON — As both political parties in Congress offer plans for lobbying reform, the American Jewish establishment finds itself in an increasingly precarious position. Jewish groups are already quietly fighting some of the reform proposals, especially the proposed ban on foreign travel financed by lobbyists, which could prevent groups from sending lawmakers to Israel. But…
Coretta Scott King, wife of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. and a longtime activist for peace and racial equality, died in her sleep Monday night at the age of 78. Jewish leaders praised her as a leader in her own right who looked beyond the concerns of her own community, and who repeatedly…
For a change, the United Nations felt like home last week. Holocaust survivors, their families and friends took the seats of pinstriped diplomats in the U.N.’s massive General Assembly hall. Emotional speeches replaced impersonal debates about war and poverty. And bitter exchanges over Israel and Palestine gave way to a dignified ceremony of remembrance of…
Following last-minute cries of protest from Muslim leaders last week, a Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Dallas canceled the premiere of a documentary on the roots of Islamic terrorism. “The Roots of War: The Road to Peace” was scheduled to air on KERA-TV on Sunday, January 29, but the premiere was postponed by the station’s…
אין פֿאַרגלײַך מיט די פֿיזישע פּאַוויליאָנען געשאַפֿן פֿון אָפֿיציעלע לענדער איז דער ייִדישלאַנד־פּאַוויליאָן געבויט אויף אידעעס
