MONTREAL — The Supreme Court of Canada heard an appeal this week by a group of seven condominium owners who contend that they have a constitutional right to build makeshift huts on their balconies in celebration of the autumn festival of Sukkot. Julius Grey, a constitutional lawyer representing the group of Orthodox Jews, argued at…
WASHINGTON — President Bush’s State of the Union Address drew mostly negative reviews among Jewish groups upset over his pointedly partisan stance on several domestic issues and his failure to make any mention of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Just months after describing the push for peace as a personal priority to which he is deeply…
The year is 1985. The U.S. Office of Special Investigations has just filed mysterious charges against Sol Schumann, a Holocaust survivor and observant Jew. Sol’s actions during the war are being called into question, sending his sons Aaron and Michael on a mission to find answers . “The Action Against Sol Schumann,” a play written…
O’Neill Observations: A story about President Bush told by former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill in a new tell-all book is drawing fire from Jewish Democrats, including Howard Dean’s campaign chairman. Quoting O’Neill on the early days of the Bush administration in the book, “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the…
The trial of an Israeli rabbi who attempted to physically block the demolition of two Palestinian houses is drawing increasingly vocal protest in the United States. In the boldest act of protest yet, Rabbi Arthur Waskow stood up in the middle of an event commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. at the Israeli embassy in Washington…
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response By Peter Balakian HarperCollins, 475 pages, $26.95. * * *| Imagine it is the present day in an alternate universe. A historically progressive American paper publishes a front-page article declaring that the Jews of Europe were killed in World War II because they were agents of…
Ed Rheingold writes from Evanston, Ill.: Your column of December 19 on the transliteration of the Hebrew letter h.et didn’t mention the word “challah,” but it’s another example of a h.et-word commonly spelled with “ch” in English and almost never with just “h.” “Challah bread” is often found in supermarkets, even where there is little…
‘I think all families are creepy in a way,” photographer Diane Arbus wrote to Peter Crookston, then an editor at the London Sunday Times magazine in June of 1968. The tone of breezy aphorism was typical for Arbus, but the subject clearly enthralled her. Many of her most iconic images — the Jewish giant at…
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…
