LONDON — British authorities bowed to Kremlin requests to begin extradition hearings against Boris Berezovsky, a Russian Jewish tycoon and former politician who has been in self-imposed exile in London for more than three years. Berezovsky, along with a former business colleague, Yulii Dubov, was arrested and promptly released March 24, in an arrangement between…
A shy young woman, Toni, drew close to my wife and me as we patiently waited for this now huge, anti-war gathering to start its march down Broadway, where so many have marched before. She was a teacher of English as a second language who had come to midtown Manhattan to express her opposition to…
Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy By Susan Neiman Princeton, 358 pages, $29.95. * * *| As any reader of the Book of Job knows, evil is no stranger to humanity, nor to God. How odd, then, that over the past two centuries so few philosophers have wrestled with the devil’s presence…
WASHINGTON — With fresh signs that the White House is set to release a controversial new Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, tension mounted this week among American Jewish activists preparing to gather in Washington for an annual show of political strength. About 5,000 activists are expected to arrive in Washington Sunday for what is being billed as…
The protean career of artist Walter Feldman has spanned a variety of disciplines, from traditional oil painting to avant-garde bookmaking. The 78-year-old Lynn, Mass., native, who worked with Willem de Kooning and Josef Albers while studying for his fine arts degree from Yale in 1951, is a printmaker, a painter and a mosaicist. His media…
In “The New Iraq,” author Joseph Braude paints a vivid portrait of modern-day Iraq and lays out a detailed plan for rebuilding the country after the war. But Braude — who has lived in Cairo, Amman, Riyadh, and Tehran — has never actually been to Iraq. Not yet, anyway. “I’ll be on the first plane…
Some years ago I attended an extraordinary exhibition of Judaic treasures at the Library of Congress in Washington. “From the Ends of the Earth” was the title that the organizers gave their display — most aptly, since the books and manuscripts on view accurately reflected the dispersion of an entire people. While the world of…
Shock and Flaw: “Most Arabs are in a state of shock,” The Daily Star, a Lebanese daily, editorialized on March 21, the day after war broke out in Iraq. “The passive manner in which we watch events unfolding around us, unable or unwilling to muster the political will to chart our own history, is a…
When a Hebrew expression that was unknown in the English language 20 years ago appears not once but twice in a column by Thomas Friedman about the war on Iraq, on the editorial page of The New York Times, that’s a linguistic success story. The expression is tikkun olam (pronounced “tee-KOON oh-LAHM”), and I don’t…
Campus Incidents Up The Anti-Defamation League released its annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents this week, showing that antisemitic incidents on college campuses totaled 106 in 2002, an increase of 24% over the previous year. Overall, the audit showed a slight increase in activity over the previous year, with 1,559 anti-Jewish incidents reported in 2002, up…
If I stood with my heels together, distributed my weight evenly and curved my arms slightly at my sides with my palms facing backward, I would be starting to shape myself in the tai chi equivalent form of an aleph, the first letter of my Hebrew name. I would also be practicing Otiyot Khayyot, or…
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