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Charity Giant Vows To Fight Barriers Facing Female Leaders
In a rare public self-rebuke, United Jewish Communities this week released a study outlining barriers that have prevented women from gaining top leadership positions at Jewish charitable federations, and vowed to take steps to close the gap. The study, conducted for UJC by the advocacy group Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, asserts that…
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A Portrait of a Musical Prodigy That Rings True
The Song of Names By Norman Lebrecht Anchor, 320 pages, $14. * * *| Few writers know more about the dark, sometimes scandalous workings of the music business than Norman Lebrecht, the author of “The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power” (Simon & Schuster, 1991) and the illuminating “Who Killed Classical Music?: Maestros,…
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Letter From Israel’s Chief Rabbi Seen As Meddling in Lithuania
JERUSALEM — The head of Lithuania’s Jewish community has sent a blistering letter to Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yonah Metzger, telling him to butt out of local Jewish communal affairs in Lithuania, the Forward has learned. Metzger sent a letter last month to the president of Lithuania, Rolandas Paksas, praising the Lubavitch rabbi in Vilnius,…
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Europeans Seen Shifting On Mideast, Antisemitism
After several years of mounting criticisms and increasingly harsh condemnations, American Jewish groups are rushing to praise European governments for their efforts to combat antisemitism and strike a more “balanced” approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the wake of a high-level parley in Brussels last week to deal with European antisemitism, Jewish communal leaders commended…
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For This Scholar, the Body Is the Window to the Soul
These are busy times for Sander Gilman, a scholar who has long studied Western cultural constructions of health and disease. Though American life expectancy is at an all-time high, our public discourse seems more crowded than ever by anxieties about our physical well-being. New Yorkers and Californians have stopped smoking in bars, 40% of Americans…
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Dashed Hopes in Iran
Only a few years ago Iran appeared to be on the cusp of fundamental democratic transformation. The 1997 landslide victory of President Mohammad Khatami had ushered in an era of expanding social freedoms and increasingly open political debate. Then, in 2000, a coalition of reformist parties won a working majority in parliamentary elections, promising to…
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You Call That a Man?
Marvin Friedman writes from San Francisco: Your recent column about the expression folg mir a gang reminded me of how my mother used to say, in a tone between contempt and sarcasm, “Oykh mir a mentsh,” which I understood to mean something like, “This is also considered a person?” In turn, this brought me to…
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PASSION UPDATE
Now that Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is actually playing in theaters (it opened Wednesday), Americans have the luxury of seeing the film before arguing about it. Perhaps the harshest newspaper review so far of the cinematic depiction of the final 12 hours of Jesus’ life came from Jami Bernard in the New…
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Blind Blundering on Tax Cuts
Once again, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan has proven his genius as a master of what George Orwell called “doublethink.” In one simple sentence, he can predict opposite outcomes and speak the truth at the same time. As our modern Delphic oracle, he might produce a weather forecast in which he says, “It will…
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Gibson’s Jesus Film Triggers Worries Across the Globe
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is set to open in Brazil early next month — and Rabbi Henry Sobel is worried. Sobel, the religious leader of Brazil’s Congregacao Israelita Paulista, the largest synagogue in Latin America, fears that the film about Jesus’ death will inflame antisemitism in his country, where 95% of the…
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A Journalist Turns the Lens on Her Life and Loves
Five Men Who Broke My Heart: A Memoir By Susan Shapiro Delacorte Press, 240 pages, $21.95. * * *| When journalists who have spent years telling other people’s stories turn the literary lens on their own lives, something interesting is bound to happen. In 1996, NPR commentator Marion Winik, at 37, walked a terra firma…
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