Drunk from his bachelor party, still in jeans and flannel shirt, Jack plops onto his bed and falls asleep. He snores. Soon he’s dreaming of tomorrow’s chupah, his white-veiled Rachel being led down the aisle by her father, Wisconsin’s goat-cheese king. Stainless-steel vats of curds roll onto the bima, and speckled sheep leap oh-so-Chagallesque over…
If there was ever an example of why I titled the book about my Holocaust restitution negotiations in the Clinton administration “Imperfect Justice,” it is the case of Simon Rozenkier. Every fiber of our beings screams out for justice for Rozenkier, a slave laborer and survivor of the infamous death march to Buchenwald who was…
A certain British society thinks antisemitism is comic — or at least cartoonish. A collection of 300 political cartoonists from newspapers throughout Great Britain are being accused of antisemitism for awarding a controversial cartoon of the Israeli prime minister first prize in their annual competition. The cartoon in question portrays a ravenous Sharon — clad…
My 2-year-old daughter bit me. She bit me so hard that four days later I still had a half-moon of tiny tooth imprints tattooed on my skin. She was playing a “Sesame Street” game on her computer (don’t get me started on my ambivalence about the computer, which she stares at with glazed intensity while…
JERUSALEM — The Israeli government is demanding a dramatically increased role in running the agency that administers Holocaust-era reparations and restitution payments, in what government leaders frankly acknowledged was an effort to direct a larger share of restitution funds toward Israel. In a blunt and sometimes confrontational meeting here last week between Israeli Cabinet ministers…
JERUSALEM — Tourism to Israel continues to show a steady increase, with as many tourists coming to Israel in the first 10 months of 2003 as came in all of 2002. Figures released last week by the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Tourism Ministry show that a total of 852,400 tourists visited Israel from…
Whenever the phone rings in my New York apartment and the Caller ID screen says “Out of Area,” I never know just how far away from Manhattan it is. Sometimes it’s my father-in-law calling from Chile; other times it’s my father from his unlisted number in Pennsylvania. When my husband, Leo, and I refer to…
WASHINGTON — As tensions grew between Israel and America this week over the Bush administration’s support for the Geneva Understandings, backers of the informal peace plan appear to be winning over some American Jewish groups, threatening to split a key pillar of Jerusalem’s support base in the United States. In one dramatic sign of a…
If Felix Posen had his way, American Jewish schools would teach the Bible less as a holy book than as a classic work of literature. “You teach Judaism as a culture. You start with the Bible, the first piece of literature we Jews created,” the London philanthropist said. “God is not dead; he is a…
“We are the No. 1 target of a new form of antisemitism….. Israel has become the collective Jew,” said Mortimer Zuckerman, president of the America-Israel Friendship League, at the league’s November 12 Partners for Democracy Award dinner. “If the Iraq venture fails,” Zuckerman cautioned, “a new wave of antisemitism will target the Jews of the…
Unemployed Jews were spilling out of the lecture hall at the Orthodox Union’s national office in downtown New York Tuesday morning. A total of 110 job seekers had signed up for the free employment workshop offered by the O.U., and another 45 had to be turned away for lack of space. The workshop took place…
