In an embarrassing retreat, the French broadcasting authority asked the country’s top administrative court to ban broadcasting from a pro-Hezbollah TV station less than two weeks after the authority granted the station a license. The High Audiovisual Council, known by its French acronym, CSA, said in a statement that it has requested the court to…
The feud between a pro-Israel media watchdog and a University of Michigan professor is fueling claims of Jewish attempts to silence criticism of Jerusalem and academic misdeeds on the part of pro-Palestinian professors. The president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, Yigal Carmon, has threatened to file suit against Juan Cole, a professor of…
As right-wing opposition mounts to Prime Minister Sharon’s plan to dismantle settlements, several leading Modern Orthodox authorities are staking out a more moderate position. Three prominent rabbis — Rabbi Norman Lamm, chancellor and president emeritus of Yeshiva University; Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, head of Israel’s Har Etzion yeshiva, and Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, a former Sephardic chief…
A coalition of American Jewish organizations this week called on mainline Protestant leaders officially to reject divestment from Israel as a potential advocacy tool. The Jewish coalition issued a detailed statement Tuesday as its official response to the Protestant groups, who have been considering divestment but asked the Jewish organizations to explain why they find…
In what Israel and its supporters called a breakthrough, the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution on Monday calling for the elimination of all forms of religious intolerance, including antisemitism. The resolution, which is expected to be voted on by the whole General Assembly soon, recognized “with deep concern…
At a recent festival of Russian culture, some of the art stayed in the closet. Several images slated for exhibit during the Russian Nights Festival, which passed through New York last month, were removed by proprietors of the exhibition space, a luxury retail and residential complex across from the New York Stock Exchange, because of…
Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, launched an online database of 3 million Holocaust victims. Beginning Monday, the database, previously available only at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, will be accessible anywhere in the world, at www.yadvashem.org. The database is part of efforts to reconstruct the names and life stories of all Jews killed in the Holocaust….
The president of the Swiss Jewish community was suspended from the European regional affiliate of the World Jewish Congress this week after he refused to drop his demand for a new audit of a controversial WJC bank account. The dispute over the account is the latest WJC drama to make headlines in Switzerland, where the…
L. Yourman writes: “I recently heard that the English word “hospitality” has an etymological connection to the Hebrew-Aramaic word ushpizin. Is this so?” Ushpizin, besides being the name of a new Israeli movie, is the plural of ushpiz, a word meaning “guest” in medieval Aramaic. In Jewish tradition, the ushpizin are the biblical patriarchs who…
As congressional Republicans scrambled to shield House Majority Leader Tom DeLay from the fallout of a possible indictment, a Senate investigation zeroed in on the lobbying activities of one of his top allies in the Jewish community. Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a DeLay ally and a major philanthropic supporter of Orthodox causes in the Washington,…
On the 35th yahrzeit of Leib Feinberg, the pages of the Forverts devoted to Pearls of Yiddish Poetry featured the adventuresome life and the passionate penitent poetry of this unusual genius. A graduate of Moscow University (1919) he became an officer of the Red Guard. For most of his early life, he was a dedicated…
