On May 4, 1961, members of the Congress of Racial Equality set out on a public bus from Washington to integrate interstate transportation through the Freedom Ride. Confronting angry mobs, the Freedom Riders — with notable numbers of Jews among them — protested segregation in the Deep South. On September 20, 2003, the first Immigrant…
A visitor to the Tokyo Nisgaoka Soccer Stadium this week is likely to hear a strange mix of languages. A Palestinian child may shout, “’Urkud!” (“Run!”) An Israeli child may call for his teammate to pass the kadur (ball), while a Japanese child may put down the ball to prepare for a ko-na-kikku (corner kick)….
You’re daydreaming while sitting in traffic on a Los Angeles freeway and you’re suddenly struck with (literally) a novel idea: What if you took the saucy, single-girl-on-the-prowl attitude of the HBO hit comedy “Sex and the City” and merged it with the 1980s children’s book fad, the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series? Seems like a…
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French-Jewish philosopher and intellectual, was in Karachi for not more than an hour — riding in a taxi from the airport to his hotel — when his driver turned to him and said: “And your religion? What is your religion?” For a moment Lévy was baffled. Lévy was in Pakistan to write…
I’m not exactly butch. I’ve got a weakness for nail polish and peasant blouses, and I’m far more familiar with the oeuvre of Isaac Mizrahi than that of Isaac Bashevis Singer. But chas v’chalila, vey iz mir and any other ptui-ptui-ptui-oriented Jewish expression you can come up with, I have no idea how I managed…
In God He Trusts: Writing in the September issue of GQ, Guy Lawson takes a stab at retracing President Bush’s religious transformation from hard-drinking oil man to God-fearing president. Titled “George W.’s Personal Jesus” and accompanied by an illustration depicting Bush as the Christian messiah, the article is packed with worthwhile tidbits regarding Bush’s religious…
Avi Hoffman, actor and Yiddish advocate, was Rabbi William Berkowitz’s guest at the August 13 American Jewish Historical Society-sponsored “Dialogue Forum” at the Center for Jewish History. Hoffman, whose credits include “The Golden Land” and “The Rise of David Levinsky,” recounted how he came to write his long-running one-man hit show, “Too Jewish?” “It was…
Two Iranians Arrested The investigation into the alleged role of Iran in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish communal center in Buenos Aires was given a boost over the past week with the arrest in Europe of two Iranians, including the former ambassador to Argentina. The two arrests were the first relating to the so-called…
We take a family vacation at the end of the summer, and every year my husband and I have the same argument: He works so hard during the year that he should be exempt from any responsibilities during our vacation — including taking care of our children. Both children are under the age of 6….
Following what some observers describe as a major rift within the campus divestment campaign against Israel, organizers of a controversial conference at Rutgers University are relocating the event to Ohio State University. The move is an attempt to minimize the influence of New Jersey Solidarity, a radical anti-Israel student group that has stated its support…
In 1931 my late teacher Cyrus Gordon, who died in 2001, was a young archaeologist working at an excavation in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. As one might imagine, the region was much safer than it is in our day. Indeed, usually there were no problems with the local villagers on such scholarly expeditions….
