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…
The victim was a Jew, slaughtered in a Houston apartment, his throat slit so deftly with a 6-inch butterfly knife that he was nearly decapitated. The killer was an Arab, a newly minted religious Muslim and the son of a millionaire Saudi businessman. He had been bailed out of trouble by the Saudi consulate after…
Though the German thinker Wilhelm Marr came up with “anti-Semitism,” and we have Raphael Lemkin to thank for “genocide,” Elie Wiesel’s “Holocaust” is the most original term in this horrid neo-lexicon. Holocaust (noun): complete consumption by fire. Our next stop in this travel-writing series was Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania — Wiesel’s hometown — where we ventured…
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration recently advised the Israeli government against taking up the offer of Syrian President Bashar Assad to resume peace negotiations, Israeli and American diplomats in Washington confirmed. The administration, according to sources, voiced several concerns regarding Assad’s recent public claims that he is willing to resume peace negotiations with Israel. The…
