Lectures and Discussions The Rules of the Get: Rabbi Daniel Rapp of the Beth Din of America, a visiting assistant professor at Yeshiva University, discusses “The Agunah: The Chained Woman” as part of the “Wrestling with Tradition: Jewish Dilemmas in a Modern World” lecture series. Avis/South Shore Jewish Community Center, 1297 Arthur Kill Road, Staten…
JERUSALEM — While Israelis gear up for an expected American war on Iraq, their leaders are increasingly preoccupied with “The Day After.” Most senior strategists here believe Israel would emerge in a stronger position after a war. A changed regime in Baghdad is widely expected to create new opportunities for Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians. No…
American servicemen manning Patriot missile batteries in Israel are having their wages garnished for federal taxes, even though other troops stationed in what is likely to become the Iraq war theater are exempted from such levies. That, said Democratic Rep. Gary Ackerman of New York, is an injustice that should be rectified. “Usually, when we…
The FBI is planning to ask the Israeli government to extradite a dozen Israelis indicted in a crackdown on several South Florida moving companies that allegedly scammed hundreds of clients. Sixteen moving companies and 74 operators and owners, most of them Israelis, were indicted March 4 in Broward and Dade counties on charges of fraud…
With war seemingly imminent, Jewish members of Congress remain deeply divided on the wisdom and timing of an American attack on Iraq. Jewish members of the House, nearly all of whom are Democrats, voted by a ratio of more than two-to-one last fall in favor of a resolution authorizing President Bush to use force, while…
ROME — When the news came that Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic had been gunned down on Wednesday by an assassin in Belgrade, I pulled out a stack of photographs I had taken of him almost a year ago to the day. It was March 17, 2002, and Djindjic was in the northern Serbian city…
Lost in America: A Journey With My Father By Sherwin B. Nuland Knopf, 112 pages, $24. * * *| Stock figures and set pieces tend to dominate the well-limned territory of memoirs written by the children of the early 20th-century immigrants who stepped off the boats from Odessa, Danzig or St. Petersburg and found, alas,…
I went to Turkey because war was looming. It seemed inevitable that Turkey would be involved, and that once war began Americans would not be welcome. I had wanted to go to Istanbul for years. In my student days in Jerusalem during the late 1960s I had heard from travelers that if one loved Jerusalem…
A promise is a promise. I ended last week’s column with the pledge to tell you why the Hebrew phrase ma’asei merkavah, “the doings of the chariot,” is sometimes humorously applied by political commentators in Israel to the process of forming coalition governments, such as the one just put together by Prime Minister Sharon, and…
Of Noteworthy Items in the Press Trunk Lines: Can the American left find its way back to a healthy pride in America? Probably not until it learns a healthy respect for the Jewish roots of America’s political culture, author Jim Sleeper argues in the winter issue of Dissent magazine. “[T]ry to explain the power of…
Josie’s childhood is already pretty different from mine. I took my first airplane flight when I was a year old (to see Grandma in Florida); she took hers at 5 weeks (to see Auntie Ellen wed in Milwaukee). I wasn’t present at my own baby-naming; my dad ran into shul on a Monday morning and…
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