Three American citizens residing in Israel lost their lives in two separate terrorist attacks during the last week. Abigail Litle, 14, a Haifa eighth grader, was killed when the No. 37 bus she was riding after school blew up last Wednesday. A 20-year-old Hamas militant named Mahmoud Hamdan Kawasme of Hebron had detonated a bomb…
The word “hamantashen,” which makes its distinguished appearance at Purim time, cannot be translated into English. The word refers to Haman, the evil pre-Hitler Hitler who wished to wipe out the Jews of ancient Persia. The word “tashn” means pockets. The combined word refers to a delicacy served at Purim in which dough is shaped…
This path-breaking work, the product of 15 years of painstaking research, brings to pulsating life the world of pre-war “Lithuanian,” or non-chasidic, Orthodoxy, in particular its yeshivas, which have come to serve as educational models for contemporary Orthodoxy in the United States, Israel and elsewhere around the world. Yet the book has been banned by…
WASHINGTON — A new World Bank report on the imploding Palestinian economy is fueling calls for an immediate resumption of peace talks. In the report, which assesses the economic repercussions of the Palestinian intifada and Israeli counter-measures, the World Bank explicitly argues for the first time that economic development in the West Bank and Gaza…
While fierce February winds howled outside as another week of winter’s deep freeze began, inside a meditation hall in Barre, Mass., 100 people sat silently, many wrapped in blankets. Some cross-legged and others in chairs were part of a weeklong silent metta retreat hosted by the Insight Meditation Society, based in this north-central Massachusetts town….
Shortly after dawn on my second morning in Tel Aviv, I heard a loudspeaker. Jet-lagged and groggy, I staggered to the terrace of my apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. Down below, a man inside a military-looking vehicle repeated a message that blasted out of a bullhorn mounted on the hood. My Hebrew ends at “shalom” so…
His name keeps popping up. Imad Mughniyeh, the infamous top Hezbollah operative, has been linked to a long list of terrorist acts during the last 20 years. His name is on a warrant for his alleged role in the March 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. But until recently he was never…
James Conlon conducts a three-concert series in “Recovering a Musical Heritage: Viktor Ullmann,” part of a yearlong program dedicated to raising public awareness about the work of composers killed during or radically affected by the Holocaust. Ullmann (1898-1944), born in Teschen — now near the border between the Czech Republic and Poland — moved to…
Ask Reverend Al Sharpton questions about public policy, and he gives terse, politically circumspect, moderate-left answers. Ask the controversial civil-rights activist and would-be Democratic presidential candidate whether he is being held to an unfair standard because of his race and history, however, and you get an earful. It’s an animated, often funny, performance, even if…
Iranian officials threatened a possible cut-off of diplomatic relations with Argentina this week, after Argentina issued its long-awaited indictment of senior Iranian officials for masterminding the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish communal center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. The 400-page indictment, issued last weekend by investigating judge Juan José Galeano, names four…
“The Golden Bear,” now at the Theater for the New City, is playwright Laurel Hessing’s adaptation of Michael Gold’s autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side, “Jews Without Money” (1930). The novel — which Hessing told the Forward she has kept to as “closely as I could” — doesn’t cast its gaze…
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