Army Chief Is Out Israel’s Defense Ministry announced that the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, will retire in July, just days before the disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank is to begin. Ya’alon will have completed the standard three-year term. Prime Minister Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz decided against…
An ambitious study of the United Jewish Communities by two top academics, exploring the charitable giant’s initial stumbles and recommending course corrections, has won a dismissive response from the organization’s chief executive. The study, released February 4, is the product of nearly 90 interviews with founders and participants in the famously troubled organization, which was…
Can a 15,000 mile round trip be remembered for a single word? It probably will be in regard to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the capital of the P.A. In her two days in the region, the secretary of state, who otherwise talked in the usual platitudes, signaled the…
THE FOOD MAVEN by Matthew Goodman Soup is among the oldest of all foods; in biblical times, earthenware pots placed on clay stands were used to prepare soups made from vegetables and pulses and flavored with onion and garlic. Prominent among those pulses were lentils, out of which Jacob made a very famous soup, the…
If you think an Israeli bobsled team seems like an alien concept, you are not alone. Call the Israeli Olympic Committee, and chances are you’ll be told that the team doesn’t exist. “We don’t have a bobsled team. Not from Israel. No, no, no,” office manager Etty Glickman said. Her colleague, Rakeset Waintraub, had said…
“It would have been lovelier if Jerry were standing here,” host Marian Seldes said — referring to originally designated emcee Jerry Orbach — at the January 24 Theater Hall of Fame “Lifetime in the Theater 2004 Induction Awards” ceremony at the Gershwin Theatre. Lynn Meadows, artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club, described honoree set/costume…
Yosef Bovshover was one of the “proletarian poets” whose works were well known in the late 1890s. He was the least famous of a group of four poets who dedicated their works to championing the cause of working people. The other three were Morris Winchevsky, Morris Rosenfeld and David Edelstadt. On the occasion of Bovshover’s…
In the latest incarnation of trans-Atlantic Jewish tensions, the leader of the French Jewish umbrella organization is blasting a rich Californian philanthropist for accusing European Jewish groups of offering only a tepid response to antisemitism. The fight centers on a letter that Newton Becker, a Los Angeles-based supporter of several pro-Israeli organizations and initiatives, wrote…
The Valentine’s Day massacre that shook downtown Beirut on Monday, killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri and at least a dozen others, is bad news not just for Lebanon but also for the region. Hariri, who had dominated Lebanon’s politics since the end of the civil war there in 1990, was killed when a…
JERUSALEM — Israel’s police and security service chiefs ordered intensified guard around top officials this week after a series of death threats were made against Cabinet ministers and others by opponents of Prime Minister Sharon’s Gaza-West Bank disengagement plan. Last Sunday’s weekly Cabinet meeting heard from ministers who read aloud from threatening letters that they…
A Jewish Republican group greeted Howard Dean’s election to chair the Democratic National Committee this week with an ad campaign seeking to depict him as a supporter of terrorism. The group, the Republican Jewish Coalition, placed full-page advertisements in the Washington newspaper Roll Call and in Jewish weeklies around the country, featuring a large picture…
