My mother died a few months ago. Her husband of 15 years is talking about what a close family we are and how we will continue to celebrate holidays together; he is already making Passover plans. I was a grown woman when they married and never considered him my stepfather. I tolerated him for my…
LACONIA, N.H. — Standing before a roaring fire on a cold night in the living room of a comfortable home here, Josh Levin demonstrated why Howard Dean is running away with the hearts of New Hampshire voters — and, probably, his party’s nomination. Levin, 25, a native of Chicago transplanted to this small town by…
Do you know Teddy Kahn? Probably not. That’s why he carries the Kosher Advantage card. Kahn never leaves home without it. The Kosher Advantage card occupies its own special place in Kahn’s wallet, and it is always with him when he eats out. Now two months old, the Kosher Advantage card works a bit like…
He has hung out with Dizzy Gillespie, played piano with the Rolling Stones, written three books, hosted national radio and television shows, co-run a jazz record label, produced albums by top jazz and pop performers and composed a Grammy-nominated film score. But what’s tickling Ben Sidran’s ivories these days is the Ben Minkoff Volunteer Service…
The melody was exactly the same. And the scene couldn’t have been much more familiar: Families sat at tables set with napkins, cups and menorahs. Some adults fiddled with matches as the rest of those gathered enthusiastically recited the first blessing. But it was not a blessing they were singing — well, not if a…
Politics by Other Means: The secret of our success, goes an old CIA proverb, is the secret of our success. The essence of the adage, to judge by recent public criticism of the intelligence community, has been lost on the agency’s fellow spooks over at the Defense Department. For much of the last year, the…
Al Grand is not unknown to readers of Der Vinkl. On numerous occasions, we have carried his Yiddish translations of the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, aka the Savoyards. Recently, he sent us the following fascinating story about a Bing Crosby conference he attended last year. “Panelist Irving Saposnik,” he wrote, “read a paper titled…
WJC Meets With Envoy The World Jewish Congress has met at the State Department with America’s newly confirmed special envoy for Holocaust issues to request that funds from Holocaust restitution agreements be used to fight antisemitism. In the meeting with the envoy, Ambassador Ed O’Donnell, the WJC’s governing board’s chairman, Israel Singer, said he asked…
“When I was at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts,” recalled Kirk Douglas at the November 24 American Legacy Foundation dinner at Cipriani 42nd St., “I met Lauren Bacall. She was a beautiful 16-year-old…. I was a poor boy. I had no raincoat…. Her uncle gave me an overcoat that I wore for two years….
More than 600 friends, family and public figures gathered in Montreal to bid farewell to Dora Wasserman, the grand dame of Yiddish theater who fled war-ravaged Eastern Europe to form the only resident Yiddish theater in North America. Wasserman died December 15 of natural causes in Montreal. She was 84. “For Dora, no hour was…
TEL AVIV — The Israeli army’s military intelligence division believes that Hamas has deliberately refrained over the last 100 days from carrying out terror strikes against Israeli civilians inside the Green Line, Israel’s pre-1967 border. The last Hamas attack within the Green Line, according to military intelligence, took place at Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem, on…
