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Arnold ‘The Brain’
Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series By David Pietrusza Carroll & Graf Publishers, 496 pages, $27. * * *| Abraham Rothstein raised his family in Manhattan in the late 1800s. A Sabbath-observant Jew, he was a successful businessman known as “Abe the Just.” One of…
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Dogmatists and Pragmatists
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was credited this week by The New York Times as being the “intellectual architect of the plan to oust [Saddam] Hussein.” The occasion for mentioning him was his recent trip to Iraq to get a firsthand sense of what was happening there. While there is no doubt that he…
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A Yiddish Song-and-Dance Man Sings His Own Story
What a Life! The Autobiography of Pesach’ke Burstein, Yiddish Matinee Idol By Pesach’ke Burstein with Lillian Lux Burstein Syracuse University Press, 224 pages, $34.95. * * *| Pesach “Pesach’ke” Burstein, the popular Yiddish song-and-dance man, set out to tell his own personal story. On that level, “What a Life! The Autobiography of Pesach’ke Burstein, Yiddish…
The Latest
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Bush Keeping Slots Open for Resettlement of Refugees
The Bush administration announced last week that it will leave the door open for the resettlement of as many as 70,000 refugees in the United States over the next year, allaying fears of refugee advocates that the resettlement program was on the brink of demise after years of declining admissions. Since the September 11 terrorist…
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A Real Metsiya!
The Forward’s features editor, Erica Brody, tells me she knows a dedicated subscriber whose Yiddish-speaking family had a “hullabaloo” about the word metsiya. What precisely this “hullabaloo” was about I don’t know, but I can imagine. How many words are there that also mean their opposite and can be confused with their homonym in the…
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CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL
Unreliable Survey?: A Jewish Democratic group is challenging a recently reported finding that 35% of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Republicans in last November’s midterm election. The statistic comes from exit polls conducted by the Voter News Service in 2002; the release of those polls’ findings was delayed for nearly a year because of…
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Illuminating the Calendar’s Joys, From Nisan to Adar
Ilene Cooper knows children’s books. As the children’s book editor at Booklist — the review journal of the American Library Association — her eyes graze the roughly 5,000 colorful mini-tomes that cross her desk each year as their writers gnaw their nails, hoping for positive reviews. Cooper empathizes: She’s an author herself, with more than…
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Labor Party Claims Victory After Municipal Elections
JERUSALEM — In a sign of voter apathy, only 41% of registered voters participated in Tuesday’s municipal elections, the lowest turnout in Israel’s history. The election, however, was a victory for Israel’s center-left Labor Party, which has not held power in the national government for three years. The center-right Likud bloc lost control of three…
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Presents (or Just Presence) at Bris?
Am I supposed to take something to a bris? I was invited to the home of a co-worker who just had her first son. I gave her a gift at her baby shower, and our department sent a beautiful flower arrangement to the hospital. Is there a protocol for giving a gift at a bris…
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Kremlin Targets Jewish Tycoons In War on Critics
LONDON — Oil titan Mikhail Khodorkovsky is not the first Jew who has risen to become Russia’s richest citizen. Before him Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky had their stints, while Vladimir Gusinsky got close. In Russia, however, life at the top is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Berezovsky and Gusinsky are now…
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Award-winning Yiddish Author Yehuda Elberg, 91, Dies in Montreal
Award-winning Yiddish author Yehuda Elberg died in his sleep in Montreal on October 18. He was 91. A widely acclaimed Yiddishist whose body of work documented shtetl life, he gained popularity in the English-speaking world after a 1997 English translation of two of his novels: “Ship of the Hunted” and “The Empire of Kalman the…
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