WASHINGTON — In a tacit admission of their inability to block President Bush’s faith-based initiative, the Anti-Defamation League and other civil-liberties groups are shifting their fight to the field, in a concerted effort to monitor social service programs run by religious organizations. The Forward has learned that ADL staffers in Washington last month spent days…
The controversial head-scarf and yarmulke ban in French public schools, the January 20 New York Times informs us, has now spread to bandanas and is threatening Sikh turbans. French education minister Luc Ferry, the newspaper wrote, “told the National Assembly’s legal affairs committee that any girl’s bandana that is considered a religious sign… would also…
If I were Jewish, I’d be worried about Mel Gibson’s film on the Passion of Jesus. I’d remember the blatant antisemitism of the Oberammergau Passion play and wonder whether Catholics were not up to their old tricks again. Hopefully I’d also remember that, while some Romans and some Jews were involved in the death of…
Rembrandt’s Jews By Steven Nadler The University of Chicago Press, 250 pages, $25. * * *| Jewish life in pre-Enlightenment Christian Europe is generally recalled as a long, sad catalogue of grievances — familiar and depressing tales of banishment and persecution allayed only by sustained Jewish resilience. But at a time when Jews were either…
Desperate to kick-start the deadlocked Middle East peace process, Arab states are pushing to reaffirm their 2-year-old proposal to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for a negotiated peace, diplomats and observers said. Already, however, the issue of Palestinian refugees is emerging as a major sticking point to formulating a comprehensive plan. Palestinian, Arab and…
Tales of Grabowski By John Auerbach The Toby Press, 307 pages, $19.95. The Owl & Other Stories By John Auerbach The Toby Press, 306 pages, $19.95. * * *| although it’s common for critics to dismiss the link between an author’s biography and his fiction, novelists and storytellers well know that the ties between work…
With the controversial film “The Passion of the Christ” set to open next month, some Christian groups are launching campaigns to counter theological errors that may exist in Mel Gibson’s account of the death of Jesus, while several Roman Catholic scholars are calling on their church to outline publicly its doctrinal belief as a counterbalance…
B y the hearth of a crackling fireplace at the Deer Park Church Camp in rural Pennsylvania, Josh Shaneson was welcomed into a brotherhood of men, for the second time. Shaneson, 19, had been inducted into manhood once before, as his yarmulke and ritual fringes indicated. But unlike his bar mitzvah, at this initiation he…
In the 1970s, Andy Statman emerged as a celebrated mandolin player in the “newgrass” movement. In the 1980s, he became a driving force behind the neo-klezmer movement. In the 1990s, he released collections with mandolin-master David Grisman and Itzhak Perlman, and was eventually lauded by The New York Times as “a master of two idioms…
PARIS — Proponents of a controversial law banning the conspicuous display of religious symbols in French public schools are rejecting charges that the measure is aimed at discriminating against Muslim girls who wear headscarves. Rather, said Patrick Weil, one of the 20 members of a presidential commission that proposed the law in December, the goal…
Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany By Walter Laqueur I.B. Tauris (St. Martin’s Press), 345 pages, $15.95. * * *| Any author who seriously and intentionally lumps together Henry Kissinger and Ruth Westheimer possesses an ambition that is admirable, or laughable — or both. In “Generation Exodus: The Fate of…
