We arrived in New York City, my parents and I, in early August l943, and immediately moved into a small apartment near Van Cortland Park, in the Bronx, courtesy of the Jewish Labor Committee. In l940 and 1941 the JLC had come to the aid of my parents, members of the Jewish Socialist Bund, who…
A dispute over racially divisive remarks allegedly made by a city employee is threatening to raise black-Jewish tensions around the Philadelphia mayoral race. Last week, the City of Brotherly Love’s Democratic mayor, John Street, reprimanded an African-American city official who allegedly complained last month in a city commerce department meeting that “Jewish lawyers” and “Jewish…
The latest Hebrew word to become a media hit is kibush. Writing, for example, in the June 2 New York Times about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s widely reported May 26 speech to the Knesset’s Likud faction, the Times’ Israel correspondent James Bennet wrote: A careful man, [Sharon] used the word ‘occupation’ [in regard to Israel’s…
“Think about it,” said author and anthologist Ilan Stavans, “the end of World War II happened not even 60 years ago. How to understand the amount of monographs and studies on Jewish themes published worldwide today, especially in English, if not as a revenge of a perseverant spirit?” Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring professor of Latin American…
WASHINGTON — North Carolina Senator John Edwards launched into an attack on big pharmaceutical companies last Thursday at the “Take Back America” conference in Washington, D.C. Getting on his populist mojo, Edwards told the left-leaning crowd that packed a ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, “The Democratic Party has to stand up to the big…
Sappho, who dates from the 7th century BCE, is considered by many scholars to be one of the world’s greatest love poets, the woman who “gave us the metaphors for passion — ‘I burn for you’ [and] ‘love is a fire’ —lines which people have been recycling for 2,600 years, without knowing who wrote them,”…
During the 1970s, the neoconservative sociologist Nathan Glazer was one of affirmative action’s leading critics. Now, with the U.S. Supreme Court expected to hand down a decision this month determining the future of affirmative action in university admissions, Glazer has signed onto a friend-of-the-court brief along with six other social scientists defending the University of…
Halliburton, the Texas energy giant, headed by Dick Cheney before his election as vice president, pleaded guilty to a charge of bribery to win tax favors from the West African country of Nigeria. The bribe was substantial: $2.4 million. The illegal action was carried through by one of Halliburton’s subsidiaries — Kellogg Brown & Root….
CANNES, France — As unlikely as it may seem these days, there was once a time when seemingly all of France worshipped an Israeli Jew. In 1975, the 28-year-old pop singer Mike Brant was at the peak of his popularity, adored by fans in his native Israel and around the world, when he jumped to…
Jerusalem Elects Mayor Jerusalem will get its first ultra-Orthodox elected mayor. Uri Lupolianski defeated Nir Barkat by 51% to 43% in Tuesday’s election, according to incomplete results. Lupolianski has been serving as Jerusalem’s acting mayor. In Haifa, Yona Yahav of the Shinui-Greens list will become mayor after defeating Likud-One Nation’s Shmuel Arad. Yahav’s election marks…
At night our bodies nearly touch in the big bed the goosedown comforter feels as light as the hand of God I remember a smaller one in a different house where I slept alone in fear without others with others I say light because God has no hands nothing except the world to define Him…
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