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Unintended Violations Of Decorum
My text is Leviticus 23:19, “And for a sin offering you shall sacrifice one male goat.” A sin offering was needed to atone for an unintended violation of ritual practice. Even though it was unintended, such a violation of norms creates a tear, a rip, in the social fabric that has to be repaired by…
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Sex Offender Becomes ‘Kabbalah Coach’
A convicted sex offender in Los Angeles has used an assumed name to market himself as a rabbi and Kabbalah instructor. Michael Ozair, who pleaded no contest to oral copulation of a 14-year-old girl in 2002, had until earlier this week been advertising himself as Rabbi Michael Ezra, the “Kabbalah Coach.” The KabbalahCoach.com Web site,…
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Finding ‘Something for Everyone’ in the Mikvah
Water is a ubiquitous and potent symbol. It can mean life, from irrigation to amniotic fluid; it can mean physical healing or inner cleansing, as in the literal or symbolical cleaning of a wound; it can mean movement, as in the currents of a river or the tides of the ocean. It makes sense, then,…
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CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL
Charming Kerry: Seeking to show an important Jewish communal group how his experiences visiting Israel had affected him personally, John Kerry told a number of stories during a speech Monday at the annual conference in Washington of the Anti-Defamation League. Before a crowd of more than 500, Kerry spoke about his trips to Israel and…
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DER YIDDISH-VINKL May 7, 2004
Dr. Barnett Zumoff, who in addition to being a prominent doctor and a motivating spirit in the world of the Forverts and the Workmen’s Circle, is also a prolific translator of Yiddish poetry into English. For some time now, he has been working on an anthology of Yiddish writings by women and about women, titled…
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Popular Market Chain Pulls Empire Products
SAN FRANCISCO — The Trader Joe’s supermarket chain recently decided to pull the products of the world’s largest kosher poultry provider and distributor, Empire Kosher, off the shelves of some 150 West Coast stores. Officials from both companies declined to say why Trader Joe’s, a 216-store boutique grocery chain, decided to cease selling fresh Empire…
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Missed Opportunities
A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples By Ilan Pappe Cambridge University Press, 333 pages, $22. * * *| Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians By Baruch Kimmerling Verso Books, 234 pages, $22. * * *| There is a growing corpus of Israeli responses to the collapse of the peace process of…
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Ousted Student Leader Becomes Darling of Left
An irate e-mail to the Israeli Embassy in Washington may have cost Jilian Redford her job as the leader of the Jewish student organization on her campus, but it transformed the 20-year-old into a darling of Jewish peace activists nationwide. Since her ouster in February as president of the Hillel at the University of Richmond,…
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Carmen Comes Home
An astonishing 100 operas are set in Seville — and not just any operas, mind you, but some of the greatest: Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and “Marriage of Figaro,” Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” and Rossini’s “Barber of Seville.” But the one chosen to kick off the first Seville International Music Festival in September…
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CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL
Among the cherished family memorabilia in the home of Inez Tenenbaum, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in South Carolina, is a signed letter to her father-in-law from Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. “It’s written on this tiny little piece of notebook paper,” Tenenbaum told the Forward in a telephone interview. The note hints…
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God, Not Gods
Harold Nebenzal of Beverly Hills, California has a question “designed to give the rabbis cardiac arrest.” It is: If in Hebrew we say [using the masculine plural ending –im] mayim, ‘water,’ while in Arabic one says [in the singular] may; and if in Hebrew [again using the plural ending] we say shamayim, ‘sky,’ while in…
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