ARIZONA “Stories Untold: Jewish Pioneer Women, 1850-1910”: TREX: the Traveling Exhibitions Program of the Museum of New Mexico is circulating this exhibition, which is composed of nine large works telling the stories of Jewish pioneer women as they made their way across the Great Plains and settled in the West. Sylvia Plotkin Judaica Museum of…
With state after state releasing dismal budget projections for the coming fiscal year, Jewish social service providers are bracing for cutbacks and further economic hardships. State governments provide anywhere from 10% to 60% of the funding to Jewish agencies nationwide that care for the most vulnerable segments of the population, including nursing homes, employment services,…
This is the second in a series of special sections celebrating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in the United States. One of the great moments in Jewish sports history came about in a World Series game. And there wasn’t even a man of Hebraic descent on the field. At the opening game…
Leonard Fein’s January 16 column “A Generational Shift That Isn’t” misstated the findings of the National Jewish Population Survey 2000-01 on political partisanship among American Jewish college students. The column should have stated that the survey found that 53% of Jewish students identify themselves as Democrats, 16% as Republicans, 14% as independents and 17% as…
Ben Stiller is one of the most talented performers, writers and directors working today. Which is why it’s so hard for this viewer to be presented with “Along Came Polly,” a sometimes funny but mostly unpleasant romantic comedy, the benighted love child of the comic coarseness of “There’s Something About Mary” and the sexual anxiety-producing…
Budget Sparks Worries Spending on Israel remains unaffected by fiscal belt-tightening in President Bush’s proposed budget, but domestic programs are under the knife, including those that most affect the Jewish community. Surveying the details in the budget Bush handed to Congress on Monday, Jewish organizational officials were especially worried about funding for the elderly. In…
I have known for quite some time that Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was a philosemite. The Argentine writer was a lover of Franz Kafka’s work, a vocal intellectual against Nazism, a fervent supporter of Israel after the Six Day War and a student of kabbala. He even wished he could read Hebrew. But a chance…
Jack Sheinkman, a former head of America’s largest clothing-workers’ union and a leading strategist of the post-Vietnam-era labor movement, died in New York last week of pneumonia. He was 77. Sheinkman was president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union from 1987 to 1995, after serving for three decades as the union’s secretary-treasurer and…
The rueful, reflective mood of “Impasse,” by Myra Sklarew, reflects a Jewish sensibility, even before the reader pieces together what must be the occasion of this poem: some disaster, explosion — possibly a suicide bombing or terrorist attack, events too depressingly familiar — and the difficulty we have, the impasse, lifting ourselves “up above/ the…
I write this reflection as a friend and professional colleague of Egon Mayer’s for the last quarter-century. He died last week at age 59, after battling gall bladder cancer. Egon, formerly director of Jewish studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and chair of Brooklyn College’s sociology department, was best…
‘A haunting story about love, language, and loss,” the February 9 issue of The Jerusalem Report calls Israeli-born, Canadian-Jewish author Edeet Ravel’s first novel “Ten Thousand Lovers.” Set in an Israel of disillusionment, a land of sadly lapsed ideals, “Ten Thousand Lovers” (Headline, 2003), the magazine informs us, is a bestseller in Canada and has…
