Eloise is moving out of the Plaza, at least for now, and the Israelis are moving in. On the last day of April, the Plaza Hotel — mythical home to the mischievous children’s-book character — closed until 2007 for renovations. An Israeli owned-firm, Elad Properties, is planning to convert the New York landmark into a…
The April 14 premiere performance of “Thomashefskys’ Yiddish Theater: An Evening of Remembrances” at Carnegie Hall/Zankel Hall, hosted by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas (a Thomashefsky grandson) was a nostalgic rollercoaster ride for the YIVO at 80 benefit audience. With over-the-top performances by Judy Blazer (as Bessie Thomashefsky); Shuler Hensley (as her larger-than-life womanizing husband, Boris);…
In a clear sign that the Bush administration’s anger over Israeli-Chinese military ties is nearing a boiling point, the Pentagon is suspending information-sharing with Jerusalem on a key fighter-jet program. The seriousness of the rift had been downplayed for months by both American and Israeli officials. Last week, however, the Pentagon announced that it was…
Israeli political resignations usually receive more notice in Israel than in America. Not this week. Natan Sharansky’s resignation Monday from his post as Israel’s minister for Diaspora and Jerusalem affairs was front-page news in America, where he is still remembered as a former Soviet refusenik and has become known as a favorite of President Bush….
GULU, Uganda — Grace Aciro was 13 when rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army roaming the countryside abducted her from her village near here in 1995. After several years as a foot soldier, she was chosen by a commander named Opiro to become one of his 10 “wives.” She bore three children with him. The…
When it comes to remembering, Jews like to think they do it best. That’s why, as the German capital unveils the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 60 years after the end of World War II, reactions from Jews in Berlin are ranging from the emotional to the apathetic and removed. “It was an…
WASHINGTON — A recent FBI interrogation of an Israeli defense expert may indicate that the Justice Department’s investigation into the contacts between America’s pro-Israel lobby and a Pentagon analyst is broader in scope than previously believed. The expert, Uzi Arad, head of the Institute for Policy and Strategy at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, said that…
TEL AVIV — Three years after the Passover Eve bombing at Netanya’s Park Hotel, arguably the low point in Israel’s war against Palestinian terrorism, the Israeli people are in a soaring mood. Everyone, that is, except country’s leaders. As far as the pubic is concerned, times are better than they have been in years. This…
JERUSALEM — The white, blue and red flags flying in the streets of Jerusalem this week signaled a historic visit: the arrival of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the first head of state from Moscow to visit since the establishment of the State of Israel. The improvement in the political atmosphere since the death of Yasser…
An article on Passover wines in the April 12 edition of the New York-based newspaper The Jewish Week relates that an “increasingly larger number of kosher wines are non-mevushal, meaning that only Orthodox Jews are involved in the wine’s production. Mevushal wine is wine that is flash pasteurized to allow non-Jews to handle it.” “Mevushal”…
Like a trompe l’oeil painting or the lectures of a well-read but deranged academic, each chapter of “The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies,” the first full-length work of, um, scholarship by Heeb magazine editors David Deutsch and Joshua Neuman, operates on a premise that is in equal parts absurd and bizarrely accurate. Recounting tales from…
די „שלום־עליכם לעקציע“ וועט מען קענען הערן אויפֿן אָרט אָדער דורך דער אינטערנעץ.
