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Network Beams America Into Arab Living Rooms
WASHINGTON — After two months on the air, Alhurra, America’s Arabic satellite TV network, has become a favorite punching bag of Arab commentators and religious leaders throughout the Middle East. Cartoonists ridicule it. Columnists dismiss it. One Saudi cleric went so far as to issue an Islamic edict outlawing Muslims from watching the network or…
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Writer’s Latest Novel Is More ‘Fiddler’ Than ‘Tevye’
The Outside World By Tova Mirvis Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24. * * *| ‘Tzippy Goldman was a good girl,” but she was trapped: She wanted to scream, to throw a fit, to escape the confines of Brooklyn and shidduch dating and, most of all, her wedding-obsessed mother. As Tova Mirvis’s new novel opens,…
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Maverick Gumshoe Unearths Leads in 1960s Czech Death
Since August of 1967, when the body of an executive at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was found floating in the Vltava river, a fog of international intrigue has surrounded the death. Now, a Czech historian and documentary filmmaker, Martin Smok, has come upon new leads in the case suggesting that the executive, Charles…
The Latest
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The Art of Tempting Memory To Speak
Feathers By Haim Be’er Translated by Hillel Halkin Brandeis University Press, 272 pages, $26. * * *| The Pure Element of Time By Haim Be’er Translated by Barbara Harshav Brandeis, 282 pages, $26. * * *| What are the common elements of memory and art? How is remembrance, with its duty to veracity, fashioned into…
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Young Donor Puts Passion for Debate Into Philanthropy
A 25-year-old Jewish philanthropist has launched one of the nation’s most generous student writing contests with a whopping grand prize of $25,000, in the hopes of altering Christian-Jewish relations following the recent debate surrounding Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ.” Introduced last week in full-page advertisements in many national newspapers — including The…
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The Adorable Moses Cow
Yosi Gordon writes from St. Paul, Minn.: That most adorable of insects, the ladybird or ladybug, is in Hebrew parat Moshe rabbenu, ‘Moses’ cow.’ A myth or legend must be lurking behind that name, but I have been unable to find it. Can you help? Indeed I can. It is not only Mr. Gordon who…
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CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL
BERKELEY, Calif. — If the Republican National Committee issued an FBI-style “most wanted” list, liberal activist Wes Boyd would probably rank near the top. The GOP has been trying to shut down one of Boyd’s projects, the MoveOn.org Voter Fund — the soft-money arm of the Internet-based advocacy group that Boyd founded in 1998 with…
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A Turkish Writer Returns to the Ghosts of His Past
‘I don’t believe there is any Jewish writer writing today, whatever the age, who is not somehow consciously or unconsciously affected by the Holocaust,” said novelist and human rights activist Moris Farhi. “I don’t think any enlightened European writer can escape the effects of the Holocaust.” Indeed, phantoms haunt Farhi, one of today’s foremost chroniclers…
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Why Courage Matters
One in a series of occasional excepts from books that catch our eye. This month, Random House releases “Why Courage Matters : The Way to a Braver Life,” by Senator John McCain, with Mark Salter. In it, McCain offers a number of profiles in courage, including one chapter on Hannah Senesh, the young Jewish woman…
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Allies Balk at Role In Implementing Sharon-Bush Plan
WASHINGTON — The White House decision to side with Israel on the issues of Palestinian refugees and West Bank settlements is producing an international backlash that could undermine efforts to implement Prime Minister Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan, diplomats and Middle East experts said this week. American officials have been urging Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority…
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‘Mitzvah Projects’ Fuse Creativity and Community
When Sara Charmé-Zane, 13, reminisces about her bat mitzvah, she doesn’t prattle on about disc jockeys. Or outfits. Or presents. After being encouraged by her rabbi to do a “mitzvah project” to mark the rite of passage, she was uninspired by the idea of simply writing a check to a charity. So she began thinking…
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