NEW DELHI — With Prime Minister Sharon this week becoming the first Israeli leader to visit India, a mantra has been chanted back and forth in Jerusalem and New Delhi: “India and Israel — two countries that share challenges and values, the only two democracies in their regions. Both countries face dictatorships that sponsor terror.”…
• Miriam Hoffman writes about her trip to Vilna via Helsinki. • Elisheva Cohen-Tsedek writes about her impressions of the latest mood in Israel. • Mikhail Krutikov reviews a new collection of essays by Arno Lustiger, a historian and writer living in Germany. • Chaim Beider greets Yekhiel Shraibman, a Bessarabian Yiddish writer, on his…
An August 22 article, “Dance Troupe From Israel Wraps Up Goodwill Tour of America,” misidentified Toni Luck, managing director of the Spirit of David Dance Theater. Ben Ammi Ben Israel is the spiritual leader of the African Hebrew Israelite Community. The article also incorrectly reported the source of funding for the tour. The Nation of…
BUENOS AIRES — While the international angle of the investigation into the 1994 bombing of the Jewish communal center here received an unexpected boost with the arrest in Britain of Iran’s former ambassador to Argentina, the trial of Argentineans accused of abetting the attack may be heading toward failure, observers said. A court is expected…
Alexander Kruse painted portraits of the neighborhoods in which he lived, beginning with Manhattan’s Lower East Side and continuing with Coney Island, Fire Island and Pawling, N.Y. Some 36 of his paintings, drawings and prints are now on view in “Alexander Kruse (1888-1972)” at the Educational Alliance, where the artist studied from 1900 to 1904…
Subcontinental Philosophy: While Indian Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee was being diplomatically correct ahead of Prime Minister Sharon’s watershed visit to New Delhi this week, the country’s paper of record was offering up nothing less than a mea culpa for India’s long-standing pro-Palestinian position. “As far as India is concerned, our ‘traditional’ support to…
Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953 Edited by James Wood Library of America, 1029 pages, $35. * * *| ‘The Dangling Man,” Saul Bellow’s first novel, published in 1944, begins with a man in a room. Demoralized, rooted in his chair, he feels it necessary to keep a journal. In it, he bemoans his solitude. But readers…
When The Great Depression hit the United States in 1929, then-president Herbert Hoover decided to do something about it. He decided to lift the spirits of the American people. As he put it, “Prosperity is right around the corner.” Theoretically, this seemed to make sense. If the people were depressed and worried about where the…
The Adventures of Augie March, 50th Anniversary Edition By Saul Bellow Viking, 586 pages, $29.95. * * *| It has been 50 years since Augie March, Saul Bellow’s thickly textured, picaresque protagonist, first declared that he was “going everywhere!” and moreover that he intended to travel in style. After all, he was “an American, Chicago…
Republican Rise: Among the interesting data released in the Voter News Service’s long-delayed 2002 election exit-polling report were statistics noting a rise of Republican voting among Jews. The VNS, controlled by a consortium of news organizations, collapsed last year because of technical problems, but enough of its report was salvageable to provide some credible data…
As scandal swirls around the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and some political commentators wonder why he isn’t held more strictly to accounts while others protest that he has been tarnished unfairly, almost everyone in Israel agrees that he should be subject to the Buzaglo Test. The Buzaglo Test, the conventional wisdom holds, needs…
