Myself Among Others: A Life in Music By George Wein with Nate Chinen Da Capo Press, 448 pages, $27.50. * * *| In the early 1960s, Newport Jazz Festival promoter George Wein tried to become Duke Ellington’s manager. Ellington rebuffed him with trademark grace: Wein, he said, was “one of the nicer guys,” and Ellington…
JERUSALEM — A charismatic, American-born rabbi and educator accused of sexually molesting his yeshiva students over a 25-year period failed to appear at a rabbinical court hearing convened to consider the accusations last week. The no-show by the educator, Rabbi Matis Weinberg, prompted expressions of outrage from several of his alleged victims, who called it…
Triple Exposure: Black, Jewish and Red in the 1950s By Dexter Jeffries Kensington Publishing, 451 pages, $23. * * *| On Dexter Jeffries’s first teaching day at Hunter College in 1990, his students confused him with fellow City University of New York professor Leonard Jeffries, best known for his theories about Jews, melanin and ice…
JERUSALEM — The Palestinian Authority was under intense pressure this week to clamp down forcefully on terrorists in order to save the Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire from collapse following this week’s horrific bus bombing in Jerusalem. Israeli officials said that Washington had warned the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, that the entire…
Every night for two weeks this summer, thousands of eager Poles almost stormed the doors of the Silesian Dance Theatre, home of the 10th summer dance festival in the small town of Bytom, stepsister to the old steel-milling town of Katowice. There, they were treated to an unlikely alliance between Polish festival director Jacek Luminsky…
In a rare, unified rebuke of the Bush administration, 15 prominent Jewish organizations have come together to decry what they say is the unlawful prosecution of legitimate asylum seekers. The groups are objecting to the federal government’s growing practice of prosecuting asylum seekers for using false documents to enter the United States. They voiced their…
CONNECTICUT As Sara Sternstein, 23, was about to get into her wedding gown the lights went off. Her husband-to-be, Laurence Hasson, 23, was already posing for wedding photos in the courtyard of the Hyatt Regency Greenwich hotel near a bubbling brook. Much to everyone’s amazement, the couple’s traditional Orthodox wedding — which they’d been planning…
Howard Dean has rocketed to the front of the Democratic presidential pack with his angry, outsider style and his overt appeals to the anti-war left. But even as the former Vermont governor galvanizes the party’s left flank, many liberals are voicing concern over his stances on some of their most cherished issues. Many single-issue activists…
Thursday, like every day in New York City, was busy. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up; the Mets had won; nobody was watching “Gigli,” and everyone was still talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger running for governor of California. But seconds before 4:11 p.m., the lights went out — and everything stopped. The thrill of being in…
Shortly after their community was awarded permanent residency status in Israel, a dance troupe hailing from the country’s controversial African Hebrew Israelite community completed its first “goodwill tour” of the United States at New York’s National Black Theatre in Harlem. Members of the Spirit of David Dance Theatre — who toured through Atlanta, Washington, D.C.,…
Arnold Schwarzenegger wants us to forget his movie career and focus instead on his untested abilities as governor. But to me the “Terminator” movies are far more realistic than the surrealism of California politics. Mankind has indeed fought a battle against machines and lost so decisively that we have become machines ourselves. We are a…
