After months of heated political battles, the Jewish Agency for Israel has managed to thwart efforts to cut its funding from American charitable federations. Faced with shrinking donations from federations and changing needs abroad, the federations’ national roof body, the United Jewish Communities, had spent the past year in a messy tug-of-war over whether to…
Professional storyteller Roslyn Bresnick-Perry read a story about lighting Chanukah candles to 12 sets of eager ears several weeks before Chanukah. In her story, she and her mischievous cousin Zisel nearly burn down the family barn while conducting a menorah-lighting ceremony using a hollowed-out potato, a string smeared with chicken fat, three matches and a…
WASHINGTON — The country’s leading Jewish charitable network has tapped someone to replace its departed powerhouse Washington director. The United Jewish Communities last week announced that it had hired Charles Konigsberg, a longtime congressional staffer, to replace Diana Aviv as the organization’s vice president for public policy. The appointment ends the fitful, six-month effort to…
A “Salute to Musical Theatre,” performed at the Rainbow Room by Patti Lupone, Audra McDonald, Ann Reinking, Roy Scheider, Michael Smith and the superb Boys Choir of Harlem enhanced the celebrity-studded November 17 “Stella by Starlight” gala to benefit the Stella Adler School of Acting. Ellen Adler announced that her mother’s Stella Adler/Clurman Archives are…
A former secretary of state noted for his strained relations with Israel and American Jewry is back in the thick of Middle East affairs — just in time to throw a wrench into the 2004 election. Last week, President Bush tapped James Baker III, a Texas oil man, longtime family friend and political fixer who…
Ten years ago, when his native Bosnia was wracked by bloody ethnic warfare, Muhamed Sacirbey was able to fly from New York to Sarajevo and back without a moment’s fear. Today the war is over, yet Sacirbey, a former Bosnian foreign minister, is scared to go home. Once the Balkan nation’s most visible spokesman, Sacirbey…
My oldest friend has chosen to be a stay-at-home mom. I respect the choice she has made. What I cannot tolerate is that her children now seem to be her only topic of conversation. I dread talking to her. Is there a nice way to say, “You’ve turned into a colossal bore”? — Talking points…
Yeshiva University, defending itself against a lawsuit by an Israeli religious academy with which it severed ties, is countersuing the Israeli school, alleging that it “utterly refused to protect” Y.U.’s exchange students from a rabbi affiliated with the academy. The Israeli school, Derech Etz Chaim yeshiva in Jerusalem, accused the university in a federal suit…
JERUSALEM — The Reform and Conservative movements appeared to win a small victory against Israel’s Orthodox religious establishment this week when a representative of the Israel Prison Service said a Conservative rabbi would be granted permission to meet with two lesbian inmates. While attorneys working on behalf of the Conservative rabbi said they had not…
Most traditional Yiddish lullabies are intended to do much more than rock a child to sleep. As often as not, they are commentaries on the state of the world in which the child will someday find himself or herself. One such lullaby appears in Yosl and Chana Mlotek’s compilation, “Songs of Generations.” It is a…
WASHINGTON — Distrust and anger in the Bush administration is growing over the refusal of Prime Minister Sharon to dismantle illegal outposts in the West Bank. Administration officials recently told pro-Israel activists in Washington that Sharon’s failure to dismantle these mini-settlements — some of them uninhabited and all of them erected without Israeli government approval…
