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…
WASHINGTON — Israel is pressuring the Bush administration to omit references to the West Bank security fence from the State Department’s annual human rights report. American diplomats in Tel Aviv recently told Israeli officials that the administration planned to refer to the fence in the report’s chapter that scrutinizes Israeli violations of Palestinians’ human rights….
“Heymishe Tekhter,” a poem by Avrom Reisen, is part of a vast work contained in a definitive anthology of Jewish-American writers in the years 1870-2000. In two volumes of some 700 pages each, Professor Emanuel Goldsmith of Queens College has carried through a historic achievement. Equally impressive is the translation of this work into English…
JERUSALEM — Shimon Peres is once again aiming to become the next Israeli prime minister. He won’t admit it, perhaps even to himself, but there is no doubt that Peres can already envision the evolving circumstances that might catapult him once again, against all odds and expectations, to the nation’s top office. Peres would have…
An article in a student publication of Yeshiva University’s affiliated rabbinical seminary that suggests the basis for the religious prohibition against murder is different for Jews and non-Jews is causing a stir in the Modern Orthodox world. The article quotes classical Jewish texts to support the argument that while the Bible contains a prohibition against…
JERUSALEM — A political consultant to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is weighing an offer to work for a right-wing Romanian presidential candidate with a history of antisemitic statements, despite the objections of Israeli Foreign Ministry officials and Jewish communal officials in America. Eyal Arad, an Israeli public-relations consultant who ran Sharon’s campaigns in 2001 and…
Two tractors sat at the edges of Ginot Aryeh, slated to be the first of many makeshift, barely-populated West Bank settler outposts soon to be removed in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement plan.” Set up in a rocky field not far from its “mother” settlement of Ofra, the outpost has a population of about 30…
The elusive search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and mounting questions about pre-war intelligence are prompting some liberal supporters of military intervention in Iraq to reassess their positions. Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and National Security Council official in the Clinton administration who wrote an influential book in 2002 advocating military action…
A leading ultra-Orthodox organization has launched a campaign to shift attention from a controversial book on Jewish superiority, choosing instead to attack the Forward’s reporting on it. Agudath Israel of America has refused to condemn the book by Rabbi Saadya Grama, published in Hebrew under the title “Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut,” which can be translated…
When Leonard Nimoy’s book of photography, “Shekhina,” was published in 2002, it created a ruckus. His depiction of alluringly glamorous women — some wearing tefillin in all their naked glory — as the essence of the feminine manifestation of God struck some as revolutionary and others as salacious. The book sold well, and even inspired…
TEL AVIV — Under opposition pressure to spell out his still-murky “unilateral” plans on the Palestinian front, Prime Minister Sharon appeared before the Knesset last Monday and did just the opposite. Gone were the phrases that had caused such a stir last month, such as “dismantling outposts” and “unilateral withdrawal.” Instead, he spoke vaguely of…
