Almost immediately after Jewish extremist Earl Krugel was bludgeoned to death in an Arizona prison, his allies began describing him as the latest in a string of Jewish Defense League officials to be targeted for assassination. Federal authorities investigating Krugel’s death, however, said they do not know whether he was murdered because of his extremist…
Helen Freedman If the opponents of Israel’s Gaza disengagement plan didn’t derail anything, the failure can’t be blamed on Helen Freedman. Freedman, the tireless executive director of Americans For a Safe Israel, was practically a one-woman opposition movement this past spring and summer. She organized rallies, wrote press releases, organized missions to Israel and the…
WASHINGTON — Claiming that Israel plans to obstruct Palestinian voting in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority is urging the Bush administration and European governments to pressure Israel to permit unrestricted participation of Jerusalem Arab voters in the upcoming Palestinians elections. At issue, Palestinian officials said, are about 120,000 residents of East Jerusalem who do not…
SHARON BROUS NAOMI LEVY While the institutional leaders of Conservative Judaism struggle to find a compelling message and arrest their movement’s decline, a handful of young Conservative-trained rabbis are finding their own ways to revitalize the broad middle of Judaism between Reform and Orthodoxy. We could have chosen some senior rabbis working imaginatively in the…
WASHINGTON — With the indictment and subsequent resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, the Bush administration has lost its most influential Jewish foreign-policy maker, Washington insiders say. Following the departure over the summer of top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, no Jewish official in the administration had…
LIMA, Peru – Salomon Lerner sometimes faced schoolyard taunts as a boy in southern Peru 50 years ago. “Other boys would call me ‘Jew’ or say the Jews killed Christ,” Lerner recalled in an interview. But he had not faced antisemitism since then — until recently. Now he is under attack for his role as…
Rabbi David C. Kogen, vice chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, died October 19. He was 86 years old. Ordained at JTS in 1946, Kogen joined its administration in 1958 as assistant to the chancellor and assistant professor in practical theology. He became vice chancellor in 1966. “Rabbi Kogen was a man whose dignity…
Teacher Shot at Shul A teenager teaching children at a synagogue in Amarillo, Texas, was shot to death by a woman, who then killed herself. Police said that Eloise Evans, 50, walked into a classroom in Temple B’nai Israel on Sunday morning and told two young children to leave. She drew a handgun and shot…
Although the holiday of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, is now behind us, it’s not too late for a column related to it. This comes in response to an e-mail from George Jochnowitz, who writes: “On Sukkot, we wave lulavim [palm branches] and pray to God, hosha na, ‘Save [us], we beseech Thee.’ The New…
These days, life seems so volatile, so captive to the vagaries of both history and Mother Nature, that it is comforting, now and then, to be able to point to something — a view of the world or an institution, say, that has held its own over time and circumstance. Happily, there is just such…
Today’s topic is hate, homophobia and family values as expressed through children’s media. Maybe that’s three topics, not one. I’m not sure. I’ll ask Tinky Winky and SpongeBob SquarePants, just as soon as they’ve gotten back from Key West. In any case, certain people seem to be feeling a certain amount of anxiety about our…
