It’s nice to remember the houses floating on water. It’s nice to stand on the shore and sing a hymn of praise while the candles burn in the windows. It’s nice to dream the loaves rising in the ovens and the floors dusted with flour, the women with the beautiful hair falling like cities into…
Seizing on what they see as a rare opportunity to attack President Bush’s foreign policy without appearing unpatriotic, Democrats and liberals are rushing to condemn the White House for its stance on Saudi Arabia — and in some cases, on the Middle East peace process. The attacks are opening up a rift within the liberal…
MOSCOW — It’s becoming a familiar scenario: Kremlin prosecutors go after a prominent Jewish “oligarch,” and Washington reacts with stern warnings that Russia is risking all the progress it has made during the last decade. Just under three years ago, the target was Vladimir Gusinsky, the press baron and founding president of the Russian Jewish…
The medical supply unit at a large Israeli army base near Tel Aviv turns out to be a nondescript collection of warehouses with corrugated roofing, stacked inside with cardboard boxes. It’s just about the last place one might expect to find an American teenager having the time of her life. But in a workroom sorting…
Last week, the declassified version of the House-Senate joint inquiry’s report into the September 11 terrorist attacks was finally released to the public, seven months after it was completed. The purpose of the report was not to assign blame for the horrific event, but to find out what could have been done to prevent it,…
No one who’s ever pondered naming a child believes that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. If Josie were named Feygie or Jemima — well, to be honest, I could no more imagine her being named Feygie or Jemima than I could imagine her fox hunting with Princess Anne. A few…
Bringing a glossy magazine to synagogue would usually register as a religious faux pas, especially if it’s the flashy food issue of New York magazine and the holiday in question is the gloomy fast day of Tisha B’Av. This year, however, worshippers — and rabbis — would do well to come to services armed with…
This week’s portion, Devarim, is read on the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av, the day on which, tradition tells us, both the First and Second Temples were destroyed. Tradition also tells us that the second destruction “came about through a Kamtza and a Bar Kamtza.” 66 C.E. Judea. A dinner party. As a wealthy gentleman, Reuven,…
BERLIN — Barely two generations after the Holocaust, Germany may be edging Israel aside as the world’s most sought-after refuge for Jews fleeing persecution. That, at least, is the impression created by figures released this month showing that Germany had outpaced Israel last year for the first time ever as the main destination of Jewish…
Merle Spiegel writes: I have been wondering about the custom in traditional Jewish homes of having dairy dinners or suppers on Mondays and Thursdays. Other things have to do with Mondays and Thursdays too, such as the weekly reading of the Torah in the synagogue on those days, the Yiddish phrase yeder montik un donershtik…
TORONTO — In an effort to improve relations between Muslims and Jews, Canada’s Pakistani community has created a journalism scholarship in memory of Daniel Pearl, the Jewish reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was murdered by Muslim extremists in Pakistan last year. It is the latest in a series of moves by Muslim and…
