TEL AVIV — Prior to Wednesday’s strike against Palestinian demonstrators, senior Israeli military officers were expressing confidence that they would have the freedom to finish their mission in Gaza without intervention from Washington, D.C. As pressure and outrage mounted from European and Arab governments, American officials and even from Israeli opposition leaders, that confidence appeared…
SKOKIE, Ill. — Sitting in this northern suburb of Chicago, the Lieberman Geriatric Centre is part of a long Jewish tradition of caring for the neediest elderly members of the community. A total of 135 of the institution’s 240 coveted nursing home beds are filled by patients on Medicaid, the government health insurance for low-income…
Syria Dumps Minister The U.S. decision to slap Syria with sanctions appears to have cost the country’s defense minister, General Mustapha Tlass, his job. After serving more than 30 years in his post and 50 years in the Syrian military, Tlass has been booted from the cabinet of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Tlass left office…
Michael Milken, the former “junk-bond king,” will give what has been billed as a “stirring” talk at an event this Sunday for investors in Israel Bonds. Milken’s speech for investors carries some historical irony, as it comes from a man who has been barred for life by the United States from taking part in any…
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — An Orlando man who used the Jewish Internet dating service JDate to lure women into dating him was arrested in Broward County last week with bail set at $21,000. Police charged Ivan Urquiza, 34, with grand theft, attempting to use another person’s identity without consent, and intimidating or threatening a witness or…
Jerusalem-based lawyer Marc Zell denied a report in the online magazine Salon.com that he had criticized Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi. In a letter to Salon dated May 6, Zell disavowed all the quotes contained in an article written by John Dizard, a Financial Times columnist. The quotes were mentioned in a story that appeared in…
Being Jewish may have cost Nicholas Berg his life, said the father of the 26-year-old American contractor who was decapitated by Islamic militants in Iraq. The Forward has learned that the slain American had, during the past year, intensified his study and observance of Judaism, and taken to wearing tzitzit, or ritual fringes. His father,…
As the scandal over U.S. abuse of Iraqi prisoners mounts, only a handful of Jewish organizations have stepped forward to speak out on the issue. Three of the organizations — the Anti-Defamation League, the National Council for Jewish Women and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism — issued statements condemning the turn of the…
WASHINGTON — Even as he struggles for his political survival, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is under pressure from the Bush administration to push ahead with his disengagement plan and fulfill his other commitments to the White House. Sharon has been scrambling to maintain support for the disengagement plan — which calls for a full…
Kerry Critique: The campaign of John Kerry is missing an opportunity to criticize President Bush’s lack of adroitness in selling Prime Minister Sharon’s disengagement plan internationally, some Democrats are saying. Others feel that Kerry should be attacking the president for immediately backtracking on his promises to Sharon. In other words, hit him from the left,…
Sometimes a seemingly trivial etymological question can lead to a long linguistic chase. Such a query was recently sent to me by Raymond Henkin, who asked: “In Uriel Weinreich’s Yiddish dictionary, the Yiddish word shmergl is translated as ‘emery.’ A search shows the origins of ‘emery’ to be either Greek or Latin. How say you?”…
