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…
As my students were packing to go home for Thanksgiving, I asked them what effect “Post-Election Stress Syndrome” was going to have on their holidays. Only two expected any troubles. One explained that his parents were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and that they would tease him mercilessly for having worked his tail off as a volunteer for…
WASHINGTON — More than 70 Jewish communal leaders, including the heads of the two largest synagogue unions, are pledging their support for aggressive American efforts to kick-start the peace process, and urging Israel to honor its commitment to freeze settlement construction. They say such steps could improve the situation in Iraq. The leaders outlined their…
TEL AVIV — In a move fraught with near-Shakespearean intrigue — though cynics said it was closer to “The Sopranos” — the top corruption fighter of the Israeli police force was sacked by his civilian boss Sunday, hours before a political gathering of the top cop’s most vocal detractors. The firing of Moshe Mizrahi, chief…
AMSTERDAM — After serving for three decades as the unofficial capital of Europe’s anything-goes, post-modern culture of tolerance, the Netherlands has been transformed with astonishing rapidity in the past three weeks into ground zero of whatever it is that is coming next. Some call it the painful, halting birth of a new era of realism….
The elections might have shown the country bitterly divided between red states and blue, but while riding the ocean’s waves it seems the only color that matters to the nation’s electorate is the Caribbean’s opalescent turquoise. With a contingent of more than 600 left-leaning souls, The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine, is set to launch…
