Allegra Tevet, like so many others, could not take the strange, hot, fall-afternoon sun this past Sunday. So my 81-year-old mother-in-law sat in the shade of a cavernous white tent as she looked up at a big video screen at Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel speaking from the plaza outside of the United States Holocaust Memorial…
On the eve of the annual gathering of North American Jewish charitable federations in Jerusalem, supporters of their main Israeli beneficiary, the Jewish Agency for Israel, are in an uproar over a proposal by fundraisers that could slash the agency’s funding. Federation representatives recommended this week that funding to their other main overseas partner, American…
LAKEWOOD, N.J. — It was supposed to be one for the record books. Thousands of people from all over New Jersey descended on Sunday’s Garden State Jewish Festival in First Energy Park—home of the minor-league Blueclaws baseball team—in an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records by creating the largest hora ever recorded….
I have just returned home after spending the weekend with several thousand fellow Holocaust survivors. We gathered in Washington, D.C., most of us brought together by the notion that this collective minyan may well be our last. We have reached our golden years — we who once lived as if each day, each hour, would…
Following a tumultuous period in its illustrious history, the Judah L. Magnes Museum — which boasts of the third-largest Judaica collection in the United States — is celebrating its 40th anniversary and marking its reopening as an independent entity with “Brought to Light — The Storied Collections of the Judah L. Magnes Museum.” This is…
TORONTO — While filmmaker Mel Gibson faces charges of antisemitism surrounding his controversial upcoming film about Jesus, another movie producer is garnering praise for making a different movie about Jesus. Garth Drabinsky, a Toronto-based show-business impresario, is the producer behind “The Gospel of John,” a movie based on the highly polemical Gospel of John, the…
In 1974, renowned architect Louis Kahn was found dead in a men’s room at New York’s Penn Station. The circumstances of the death of Kahn, a secretive man, only compounded the mysteries that surrounded his life. Bankrupt, he was on his way home from India, having completed plans for one of his greatest architectural achievements,…
“As a Jew, it was Hitler and me. That’s the way I pictured the war.” — Theodore Diamond, U.S. Army Air Force For America’s Jews World War II was not just a fight for their country. It was also a fight against the global scourge of fascism that threatened their fellow Jews abroad. “Ours to…
It might be Halloween, but a Jewitch — yes, a Jewitch — has need for neither pointy hat nor broom. In fact, this year, Jewitches across America are likely to welcome the Sabbath before they consider cavorting with their covens. Take Carly Lesser. Lesser has been known to spend Pagan Pride Day marching in Washington,…
Despite mounting criticism of the administration’s Iraq policy, Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be ratcheting up his commitment to the circle of neoconservative intellectuals who helped spearhead President Bush’s war policy, adding one of its most controversial proponents to his national security staff in a little-noticed move last month. David Wurmser, a neoconservative scholar…
The Zionist Organization of America, an organization known for its aggressive tactics and harsh criticisms of the White House, has dismissed its top Washington lobbyist, Sarah Stern. Stern told the Forward that she and ZOA president Morton Klein had repeatedly clashed over his intense criticism of the Bush administration. But, she added, the differences came…
