I have lived in the nation’s capital for 30 years. Yet it was only this summer that I discovered Washington’s grand tribute to Samuel Gompers. Located in downtown Washington, the monument is positioned in Samuel Gompers Memorial Park on Massachusetts Avenue, a major artery, between 10th Street and 11th Street, N.W. When I conducted an…
With the Middle East peace process again in tatters, one boldface name is offering a dose of reggae for the battered sides. Singer Ziggy Marley, son of late reggae superstar Bob Marley, has penned “Shalom Salaam,” which, as he told the Forward in an interview, calls for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. “I understand the…
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…
Jewish activists mourned the violent death of the United Nations high commissioner for human rights and expressed hope that his successors will pursue his efforts to reach out to Jews and Israel. The high commissioner, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was among at least 18 people killed in Tuesday’s bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad,…
Is it acceptable to offer one’s sympathy about a recent divorce or death in a social setting? I was at a dinner party and ran into a woman whose mother had died and to whom I had never written a note. I felt awkward not acknowledging the death, but I didn’t feel that the setting…
As France endures 100-degree temperatures, Parisian Jewish organizations have struggled to cope as unburied corpses have had to wait up to four days for burial. Reports suggest that as many as 3,000 people have died during France’s August heat wave. Hardest hit were the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. Death rates in Paris…
Stanley Siegelman seems to be as prolific as his timely, topical poems are terrific. Just a few weeks ago, we ran his poem about the White House with a president named Joseph Lieberman. While readers were still giggling, he sent us a second bit of brittle, brilliant humor on Senator Hillary Clinton’s biography. And now,…
