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METROPOLITAN NEW YORK
High Holy Days Initiate Yourself: The egalitarian “liberal” East Side Synagogue offers introductory services catering to the unaffiliated. The liturgy is in English and Hebrew and is meant to draw out the relevance and meaning of the High Holy Day period, a time of rebirth and renewal, introspection and moral inventory, forgiveness and growth. All…
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Starting a Revolution in the National Religious Party
Some women just won’t take no for an answer. After Gila Finkelstein helped to broaden Israel’s National Religious Party base as a candidate in the 1999 parliamentary elections, she thought she would gain a seat representing the party in the Knesset. But party leaders — notably Israel’s former Sephardic chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, considered the…
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You’re in the Army Now
Infiltration By Yehoshua Kenaz, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu Steerforth Press, 593 pages, $19.95. * * *| The existence of the Israeli army is the fact that, above all else, makes Israel different from all Jewish communities since the wars against Rome two millennia ago. The spirit, expertise, power and even the morality…
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SPEAKING OUT ON CENSORSHIIP
In May 1943, New Yorkers gathered together in Bryant Park to remember the tens of thousands of Nazi sympathizers who gathered on college campuses across Germany on May 10, 1933, to participate in the burning of some 25,000 books by scientists, philosophers, political theorists and poets labeled “degenerates” by the Nazi regime. For the opening…
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IN OTHER WORDS…
Picture This: Partisanship may be a staple of pre-election years, but this year’s candidate-bashing by the media seems to have a particularly nasty flair to it. Take, for instance, John J. Miller’s cover story in the September 1 issue of the conservative National Review, titled “The Awful Specter of Yet Another Term.” The article takes…
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Rav, Rebbe, Rabbi
M r. Rosenberg writes from Kansas City: “A group of us were discussing the derivation of the word ‘rabbi.’ We know what it means, obviously, and are aware of its various permutations — rov, reb, rebbe, rebenyu. But what is the root meaning of the word?” The root meaning of the Hebrew word rav, “rabbi,”…
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Newsdesk September 19, 2003
Abdullah, Jewish Leaders Meet Jordan is seeking the right timing to send its ambassador back to Tel Aviv and will “hopefully” do that soon, Jordan’s King Abdullah II told a small group of Jewish community leaders in Washington Monday. The king, currently in the United States for a meeting with President Bush, was “upbeat and…
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FLASH FRAMES
Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments By Oz Shelach City Lights, 115 pages, $11.95. * * *| Had Ernest Hemingway succeeded in writing the novel suggested by the vignettes that punctuate “In Our Time,” the result might have resembled Oz Shelach’s “Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments.” The novel, Shelach’s first, is set in an…
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Rabbi Facing Fraud Charges Plans Return to Fundraising
A Brooklyn rabbi charged with defrauding the federal government of almost $700,000 is proclaiming his innocence and vowing that his legal troubles have only temporarily halted his prodigious political fundraising. Milton Balkany, the dean of an Orthodox girls’ school in Boro Park, surrendered to authorities on August 26 to face charges that he used a…
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Journalist Investigates Rise of Neo-Nazi ‘Little Hitlers’
Several years ago, journalist Elinor Langer was on an airplane preparing for a lecture she was about to give about the death of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant murdered by skinheads in Portland, Ore., in 1989. As Langer began shuffling through pictures and cartoons that the police had seized from the house of one of…
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Sale of Arrow Missile Systems Put on Hold
WASHINGTON — In response to negative reactions from the Bush administration, Israel is putting off attempts to sell the Arrow missile-defense systems to India. Pro-Israel lobbyists have recently raised the issue with senior officials at the State and Defense departments and congressional staffers, according to Jewish activists in Washington, as well as congressional and diplomatic…
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