History’s most virulent antisemitic propaganda essay, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” was first published 100 years ago this week. Though the Protocols turned out to be both a notorious plagiarism and a shocking forgery, the essay would exercise a powerful impact upon the modern era, principally as a critical factor in generating the…
Lieberman Catch: The presidential campaign of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman is tapping a top staffer of New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to head its operation in New York state. Basil Smikle, Clinton’s deputy state director, will be joining the Lieberman campaign in September, spokesman Jano Cabrera confirmed. The appointment should make for some interesting…
Photojournalist Marvin J. Wolf — who’s been honing his craft for nearly 40 years — trained an unobtrusive camera on the 200 families of Congregation Mishkon Tephilo, capturing the congregants of the seaside Los Angeles community of Venice as they observed Jewish rituals and rites. Some 30 digitally manipulated images from his series are on…
Last May a few dozen members of the Texas House of Representatives fled the state to stymie a Republican redistricting plan, halting the process. Remember that? If so, you probably also know that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, and his allies enlisted the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and even the new…
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 — Despite the shaky cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel’s streets are stained with blood this summer, due to an explosion of gang warfare that has police baffled. One of Israel’s most feared mobsters, Yisrael “Alice” Mizrahi, 58, was killed last week when his Mercedes jeep was blown up near his south Tel…
Last Century of a Sephardic Community: The Jews of Monastir, 1839-1943 By Mark Cohen Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 432 pages, $34.95. * * *| Last month, I saw a Jewish homeless man near my apartment. He was wearing a yarmulke and muttering Hebrew words, and I think I saw a…
JERUSALEM — Israel’s summer of calm was on the verge of collapsing into new warfare this week, after a pair of deadly Palestinian terrorist attacks left tempers near the boiling point. The back-to-back suicide bombings, the worst spate of terrorism since the Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire began six weeks ago, left two Israelis dead and several more…
Of the friends I have made in my Balkan travels, there is nobody alive who is dearer to me, in certain respects, than professor Muhamed Nezirovic´ of the University of Sarajevo. Born in Sarajevo in 1934, in the mixed Muslim and Serb mahala, or neighborhood, of Nadmlini, Hamo — as he is universally known —…
