American authorities are set to designate as a terrorist entity a pro-Hezbollah TV station that was recently banned in France. An American official confirmed that the Treasury and State Departments were about to take such a step against Al Manar, a station based in Lebanon that has been broadcasting in America for several years. The…
Kerry and Kofi: Senator John Kerry is adding his voice to those in support of embattled United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose resignation is being demanded by a growing chorus of American lawmakers enraged by the U.N.’s oil-for-food scandal that allowed Iraq to evade international sanctions. “John Kerry does not believe there’s evidence that Kofi…
Santa Claus might not have to check his list twice to judge the naughtiness of five college students in Michigan who hopped the fence of a Jewish cemetery on December 6. According to police, the students cut down a pair of pine trees to decorate their dormitory. Four 18-year-old boys and one 19-year-old girl, all…
LIMA, Peru — Peru’s unlikeliest political alliance became one of its ugliest rivalries last spring, when relations between the Andean nation’s first lady and its most powerful television mogul erupted into a violent shouting match — all in Hebrew. Eliane Karp and Baruch Ivcher, both former Israelis, had been among the leaders of the fight…
Amy Neustein’s marriage lasted less than four years; her battle to reform the court system that barred her from seeing her daughter following a nasty custody dispute has raged for nearly two decades. Now, Neustein, an Orthodox Jew with a doctorate in sociology, says she sees some light at the end of what has been…
JERUSALEM — Israel’s government took its first public step last week toward the formal creation of an international Jewish “parliament,” whose purpose would be to represent Diaspora Jews in the formation of Israeli government policies that have potential impact on Jewish life in other countries. The initiative was unveiled at a special Monday meeting of…
Sara Zwerin, 89, of Sunrise, Fla., barely can walk and is legally blind, but she is an avid card player who plays canasta at Daniel D. Cantor Senior Center three times a week, using special large-print cards. And, as of last week, she is also a bat mitzvah. Like most elderly Jewish women, Zwerin never…
The White House’s budding relationship with the Orthodox Jewish community was on display last week at three public events that some participants said signaled who’s in and who’s out of favor with the administration as President Bush heads for a second term. An intimate December 9 meeting between the president and 15 communal leaders featured…
In the names of God, one fashion designer is producing T-shirts and skirting conflict with the famed Los Angeles-based Kabbalah Centre. Ayelet Aviv, an Israeli artist from Mitzpe Ramon in Israel, recently went solo with her line of Kabbalah-inspired T-shirts after an alleged collaborative agreement with The Kabbalah Centre fell through because she refused to…
Is Ariel Sharon an Israeli de Gaulle, come to power promising to implement the program of the nationalist right and instead becoming the vehicle for carrying out the ideas which the left had been unable to implement on its own? Will the death of Yasser Arafat really clear the way of the stumbling blocks that…
In this third and last column on linguist Dovid Katz’s theory of the origins of Yiddish, let us pose the question: Is there any historical evidence for a migration around the year 1000 C.E. or later of a community of Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East to a German-speaking area of Europe — a migration…
