Strains of the “Ma Tovu” — “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob; Thy dwellings, O Israel!” — filtered from the human synagogue to the nearby barn. The flock’s elder, a white ram, turned to the kids and lambs, bullocks, calves and colts sitting up front on the hay: “In this week’s parsha, Chukat, we…
Rebuffing Washington, the European Union decided last week that it will not reclassify the political wing of Hamas as a terrorist group, insisting that its activities qualify it as a legitimate organization. Meeting last week in Brussels, the 15 European foreign ministers reached a unanimous decision not to change the political wing’s designation, a move…
The columns in the Forverts titled “Pearls of Yiddish Poetry” observed the 65th anniversary of Abraham Liessin’s death. He was born in Minsk in 1872 and studied at several outstanding yeshivas. But he reached out to the secular world and to the young radicals who idolized him, secretly distributing his incendiary poems and articles from…
JERUSALEM — A public attack against playwright Arthur Miller is the latest in a string of moves by Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski that critics say raise questions about his ability to reach out across religious boundaries. Lupolianski, a relatively tolerant ultra-Orthodox politician, was upset by remarks made by Miller late last month in his videotaped…
The emergence of the Internet a decade ago promised to do for media what Judaism did millennia earlier for religion: turn our understanding of the world from a vision received into a vision negotiated. Both cyberspace’s networkers and Israel’s God-wrestlers have sought to turn top-down affairs into participatory ones. Instead of passively listening to the…
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Sharon is facing growing political obstacles in his efforts to steer Israel along President Bush’s “road map” to peace, and insiders say he may soon be forced to reshuffle his Cabinet and reestablish a broad-based unity coalition with Labor. Sharon’s moderate policies are meeting opposition not only from his right-wing coalition…
Three Jewish prisoners in the New York City jail on Rikers Island are suing the commissioner of the Department of Corrections demanding a change in the menu. No, these prisoners are not campaigning for kosher cuisine. They want their jailers to provide them with a vegan diet that excludes not only meat but also eggs,…
WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Sharon has no plans to rebuke a senior minister in his Cabinet who publicly lambasted President Bush’s Middle East policy in a New York briefing this week and stated — incorrectly, it appears — that he had the support of a ranking presidential adviser. The minister, Effi Eitam of the National…
Worried about being diplomatically isolated by Middle East peace talks, Syria has signaled its willingness to enter into negotiations with Israel for the second time in recent months. Syrian President Bashar Assad and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak issued a joint communiqué Monday urging the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia — the so-called…
JERUSALEM — Five weeks after he was elected, Jerusalem’s first ultra-Orthodox mayor is set to announce his governing coalition next week, formally ushering in a new and unfamiliar era in municipal politics in the Israeli capital. While the city council was certain to be dominated by the Orthodox and right-wing parties that back the new…
The White House is nurturing a cadre of Generation X Republican Jewish activists, many of them Orthodox, as part of a concerted strategy to boost Republican strength among Jewish voters — and Jewish political donors — in the run-up to the 2004 election. In private conversations recently, Bush aides have voiced hopes that the president’s…
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