TEL AVIV — After days of furious maneuvering to prepare for the post-Yasser Arafat era, Israelis and Palestinians were waking up this week to the sobering realization that reports of the Palestinian leader’s demise might have been premature. “Arafat’s prospects for recovery range between full recuperation and death,” Israel’s military intelligence chief, Major General Aharon…
LETTER FROM VITEBSK The town of Vitebsk has been the central character in the work of Marc Chagall. Its people and cityscape maintain a recurring, almost mystic presence. Chagall was intimately familiar with this town. The artist was not only born and raised there, but also came of age as a master in Vitebsk. Although…
Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists and a writer internationally renowned for haunting depictions of a child’s survival of the Holocaust, was awarded the Prix Médicis Etranger, France’s top literary award for a foreign writer and one of Europe’s most important awards, last Wednesday. Previous Médicis prize laureates include John Updike, Philip Roth…
From Morton Steinberg comes this query: “A word in Hebrew that has always troubled me is tsohorayim, ‘noon,’ which is in the dual plural form. Is the proper greeting for ‘good afternoon’ tsohorayim tov [with the adjective tov, ‘good,’ in the singular] or tsohorayim tovim [with the adjective in the plural]? And why is the…
Fresh off of victory, President Bush will face a major test in the coming weeks on the multilateral approach he has adopted toward Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Even as Washington is backing European efforts to pressure Tehran, the newly re-elected president is looking to the United Nations Security Council to pick up the…
Ruth Rubin’s book “Jewish Folk Songs,” published about a half-century ago, remains one of the treasure troves of Yiddishkeit in America. The multitalented Rubin was a performer, a recording artist and a translator of Yiddish folk songs into English. What follows is one of her masterpieces, titled “Sheyn Bin Ikh, Sheyn.” Sheyn Bin Ikh, Sheyn…
Even as the country handed President Bush and the Republicans a strong mandate, Jewish voters appeared to rally to the side of John Kerry. Two national exit polls showed that Bush gained only slightly more than the 19% of the Jewish vote he scored in 2000: One, from The Associated Press, showed Kerry winning 77%-23%;…
On October 27, police found the body of a 75-year-old Jewish man from Brooklyn, N.Y., who had been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Then the police announced that the suspect in custody was the man’s roommate — a Hasidic cross-dresser. The Forward has learned that the victim, Rahamim “Raymond” Sultan, was a regular…
A decade ago, as chief spokesman for the Israeli government, I went with then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to Cairo for the signing of an agreement on the handing over of Gaza and Jericho to the Palestinians. Like my boss, I was fully committed to the peace process, but even during those heady early days of…
WASHINGTON — With Yasser Arafat plagued by a mysterious medical condition, the Bush administration is pressing the Israeli government to begin cultivating a new Palestinian leadership and to launch talks regarding the territories. Sources close to the administration said that in recent days, Bush and his aides have been urging Sharon to coordinate Israel’s withdrawal…
The Forward Association, a 107-year-old nonprofit group, will sell its Russian-language newspaper to Mitzvah Media Group, the media arm of Russian American Jews for Israel, a nonprofit advocacy group. Samuel Norich, chief executive of the Forward Association, announced the sale Wednesday. The weekly Russian Forward currently provides news, opinion and analysis to tens of thousands…
