The parallels between the story of Passover and a modern-day struggle for worker rights resonated loud and clear at a picket line outside a glatt kosher restaurant on the East Side of Manhattan last week. Immigrant workers and representatives from several local unions and Jewish labor groups waved union posters, ate matzo, drank grape juice…
Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather And the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna By Peter Singer Ecco/HarperCollins, 272 pages, $24.95. * * *| Ever since his “Animal Liberation” hit the best-seller lists in 1975, Peter Singer, the Australian-born philosopher and recently appointed professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has been notorious for his radical views in support…
ANTWERP — All hell broke loose on Jews here in mid-February. It was not antisemitism. It was not Iraq. It was merely the largest robbery to hit this Belgian port city in decades. Armed robberies are not usually issues that preoccupy Jewish communal defense experts. The problem this time was that the daring, $120 million…
The Scroll and the Cross: 1,000 Years of Jewish-Hispanic Literature Edited by Ilan Stavans Routledge, 329 pages, $95 (hardcover), $26.95 (paper). * * *| Notwithstanding a few timeless classics, a truly good Jewish anthology, say by Irving Howe, is hard to come by. There are tough editorial choices to be made. How can the volume…
Givat Haviva Head Resigns The top professional of an organization supporting Jewish-Arab dialogue programs in Israel abruptly stepped down last week after a report linked him to leaders of the self-described anti-Zionist New Alliance Party. Robert Levy, executive director of the Givat Haviva Educational Foundation Inc., resigned 10 weeks after the Forward reported that Levy…
The Pen Is Mightier: The Muckraking Life Of Charles Edward Russell By Robert Miraldi Palgrave Macmillan, 352 pages, $35. * * *| When Robert Miraldi was looking at microfilm at the Tamiment Library at New York University some years ago, he was surprised by what came up on a nearby scholar’s screen: a large photograph…
On October 8, 1957, Brooklyn Dodgers publicist Arthur “Red” Patterson shocked the baseball world when he announced that the team was moving to Los Angeles. Since that time, Brooklynites have clung to their hatred of then-owner Walter O’Malley. Some would go so far as to say that the Dodgers’ abrupt departure destroyed Brooklyn’s soul and…
Chanting the Hebrew Bible: The Art of Cantillation By Joshua R. Jacobson Jewish Publication Society, 965 pages, $75. * * *| Reviewing Joshua Jacobson’s encyclopedic new “Chanting the Hebrew Bible” is akin to summarizing the Torah while standing on one foot. Cantillation — which comes from the Latin cantare, to sing –– is a system…
Now It’s Trotsky’s Fault? Conspiracy theories about a clique of Jewish neoconservatives hijacking U.S. foreign policy got bumped up a notch or two this month, when the celebrated Washington policy wonk Michael Lind published his version in the British journal New Statesman. Writing in the April 7 issue of the fabled Fabian sheet, Lind claimed…
Les Juifs, le monde et l’argent: Histoire économique du peuple juif (Jews, the World and Money: An Economic History Of the Jewish People) By Jacques Attali Librairie Arthème Fayard, 638 pages, 25 euros. * * *| Almost nothing sells better than a book about Jews, especially if its author happens to be Jewish: Gentiles will…
WASHINGTON — Looting, vandalism and murderous retribution — the visible expressions of lawlessness that immediately followed the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime — do not even begin “to touch the tip of the iceberg” of the legal challenge that America and its allies face in Iraq, says Neil Kritz, one of the nation’s leading experts…
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