As a young girl, Anita Hoffer spent hours on her grandparents’ laps listening to tales of their cosmopolitan lives in pre-war Berlin. They were thankful to escape Germany before the Holocaust. But as chicken farmers in Vineland, N.J., during the 1950s, Hoffer’s grandparents couldn’t help but pine for the furniture dealership they left behind. “My…
Doctor Killer Convicted Anti-abortion extremist James Kopp was found guilty Tuesday for the 1998 sniper shooting of a doctor who provided abortions. Kopp faces 15 years to life for shooting Dr. Barnett Slepian. A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for May 9. Slepian was killed on a Friday night by a single bullet from a…
York University, a suburban Toronto campus with Canada’s largest concentration of Jewish students, is reeling from the “Concordia virus” — the spread of tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students that previously infected Montreal’s Concordia University. Last week, Toronto police briefly arrested, but did not charge, a Jewish student for allegedly uttering a death threat after…
A March 7 article, “Backing Israel on Terror, Bush Preps Postwar Push For a Settlement Freeze,” mistakenly stated that Israel had suffered no civilian casualties in the two months preceding March 5. Israel had experienced a two-month lull in suicide bombings.
Gender politics figure prominently in the post-modern dance work of the stirring young Israeli choreographer Rotem Tashach. In his new piece, “Nekeva” (a derogatory Hebrew slang for female), which opened yesterday at Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Arts Nexus (W.A.X.), where it will be performed through March 23, the fragility of sexual identity is explored amid a multimedia…
Gleanings From the Media Continental Divide: It’s not just London Bridge that seems to be falling down these days in Europe, judging by articles in several European newspapers translated and reprinted in the April issue of World Press Review. “Europe is cracking,” Leopold Unger writes in the February 11 issue of the liberal Polish daily…
Nathan P. Baker of Walnut Creek, Calif., has a query about the city of Medina in Saudi Arabia, the second-holiest site of Islam after Mecca. “I was quite surprised,” he writes, “to learn that it was a Jewish city, called Yathrib, long before the time of Muhammad. Could you furnish me, please, with the dates,…
It’s a typical morning at Borough Hall in downtown Brooklyn. Politicians are meeting and greeting, children are dancing jigs and an impressive amount of Irish coffee is being consumed at 9 a.m. The borough’s stentorious president, Marty Markowitz, a smiling, roly-poly man, is wearing a tall striped hat that seems plucked from the pages of…
It was nearly 8 p.m. when the klezmorim danced their way in to greet the crowd, hoisted their instruments on stage and proceeded to make a l’chaim on the berry-flavored schnapps that awaited them in a tall, elegant bottle. The musicians didn’t look like Old World incarnates in their sleek black ensembles, nor did they…
BERKELEY, Calif. — A Modern Orthodox congregation that hoped to build a replica of the wooden synagogue of Przedborz, Poland, has reluctantly abandoned its dream after failing to garner national financial support for the project. Instead of re-creating the famous 17th-century structure destroyed by the Nazis, Congregation Beth Israel will spend the $2 million raised…
Literary awards come and go, but some just stick around quietly separating young writers with promise from those dripping with glitz — especially these days, when hype and hard cash are being thrown at writers in the under-30 class. All of which makes the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award worth celebrating as it approaches its…
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