It is a battle that has involved collapsing buildings, racially-charged protests and two of New York’s most powerful Jewish developers, pitted against each other for the future of New York’s skyline. At stake, say community activists, are the characters of two iconic, heavily Jewish New York neighborhoods known as bastions of middle-class liberalism. The main…
They are a minyan, just barely. Half of them come to pray with guns. The rabbi, Mitchell Schranz, would rather his congregants leave their Berettas and their M-4 rifles at home than bring them to this nondescript alcove, not far from a former palace of Saddam Hussein. But this is Camp Victory, the American military’s…
On the first Friday night of July, I attended Sabbath eve services at Kehillat Ra’anan, a Progressive congregation in Ra’anana, Israel. The services — a prelude to the bat mitzvah of my niece Shirah, which was to be celebrated the next day — contained a memorable and moving new ritual, one I had never witnessed…
An unveiling is not a thrill. It’s sad, but also drab. And it’s sort of pro forma. It happens after the Kaddish period ends but before a full year elapses. You recite a psalm. You say “El Maleh Rahamim,” the prayer about God being compassionate. (Bad form to add, “Ha!” — even if in this…
If you have ever believed that a restaurant charged a woman two thousand dollars for a cookie recipe or that alligators live in the New York City sewers, you have been taken in by an urban legend. Unverifiable, verbally-transmitted indicators of the fears and wishes of their tellers, urban legends are the modern equivalent of…
If there had been any doubts before, the recent attacks in London, the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh and the Turkish beach town of Kusadasi have made clear that terrorism is here to stay. Periods of quiet, it is becoming obvious, are nothing more than intermissions between terrorist acts. Since September 11, 2001, there have…
Since opening its doors eight years ago, New York’s Payard Patisserie & Bistro has been known for its upscale clientele, Parisian décor and heavenly pastries. But for the last couple of months, Payard has had one more thing to its credit: kosher options. Since the spring, the shop has offered a small selection of kosher…
When David Koster wanted to help someone in need, he didn’t flinch from giving of himself — literally. Koster, a 56-year-old Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood, donated one of his kidneys two years ago to a man from San Francisco, Calif., whom he met for the first time on the day of the…
It was thrust and parry at the Aleph Society’s June 21 dinner at the Essex House, at which Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow refereed a dialogue on bioethics between Talmudic scholar Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz and University of Chicago professor Leon R. Kass. Born to a secular family in Palestine in 1937, Steinsaltz — whom…
As world leaders scrambled this month to make sense of a seeming upsurge in deadly terrorist attacks around the globe, Israeli policymakers were struggling over how best to portray their nation’s place in the mayhem. In response to the attacks, some Israeli officials were suggesting that Palestinian strikes against Israel were part of the worldwide…
TEL AVIV — Just two weeks before the commencement of what could be the decisive political step in his career — pulling Israeli troops and settlers out of Gaza — Ariel Sharon suffered one of his career’s most serious political and personal blows: the indictment of his son, Omri, on campaign finance violations. The indictment,…
