They cheerfully rode the New York City subway uptown: three Jewish women in their late 50s or early 60s, bundled up in heavy coats decorated in peace buttons. Millions of protesters in 600 cities around the world were rallying against a looming war in Iraq, and these New Yorkers did not intend to be left…
Brussels, the bilingual capital of Belgium, is Old Europe at its architectural best. The center of the old city is the Grand’Place — Grote Markt in Dutch — an exquisite square lined with gold-laced 17th-century buildings, constructed by the guilds that once ran Brussels’ civic life. One of the most elaborate of these buildings is…
The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 By Pierre Birnbaum Translated by Jane Marie Todd Hill and Wang, 352 pages, $30. * * *| Imagine that an impartial observer had tried, in the year 1900, to predict which European country would attempt to exterminate the Jews during the coming century. The most likely…
At times it seemed as if the entire McWorld was against Samuel Hirsch. The Manhattan lawyer catapulted to infamy last summer as he spearheaded a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s on behalf of obese teenagers. As the latest player in the assign-the-blame-game, Hirsch became the brunt of late-night talk show jokes and a poster boy for…
Ann Sperry’s powerful, meditation-inducing sculptures on display at the retrospective at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum (through June 26) testify to a career defined by obsessions. How to register in hard steel the lambent instant when something springs into life. How to re-create, with an absence of sentimentality (and often by using…
Affirmative Action Backed The American Jewish Committee Tuesday filed an amicus brief, co-signed by a coalition of Jewish organizations, defending the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies now being challenged before the Supreme Court. “Disallowing the consideration of race as one factor among many in university admissions would have the effect of eliminating meaningful diversity…
Readers Roslyn Weiss, Menachem Kellner, Peretz Rodman, Martin Jaffee, Jacob Haberman, Gil Student and Michael Bohnen have written in about my January 17 column “Faithful or Fraudulent” — in which, analyzing the Mishna in Sanhedrin containing the statement, “Whoever saves a single Jewish life [nefesh mi-yisra’el] is said by Scripture to have saved an entire…
Ahead of the Field: “People look at me as if I was from another planet,” laments Ahmad Rezkallah in the February 18 issue of Arab News, an English-language Saudi daily. It’s hard to know why, since Rezkallah is described as “a pleasant man with a broad smile” who earns a decent living hacking off people’s…
gotta go now.” Ina heard something in her mother’s voice, a catch, a rasp, a whisper of a plea, an unsaid word that left an echo in the phone line. “Mother,” Ina asked, “ do you remember how we used to play gin rummy when we rented that beach house the summer I was 8…
WASHINGTON — Islam was the main focus when conservative Christian activists gathered here last weekend for a symposium on the Muslim faith. But it wasn’t the only target. One speaker at the Christian Coalition-sponsored event took aim at American foreign policy, declaring that September 11 was a divine punishment against the United States. William Koenig,…
Two historic programs to provide medical care to senior citizens and to people who are in need of medical attention but cannot afford it are presently under fire. If the White House has its way, both these programs will be badly crippled. Here’s how: The attack on Medicare is cynically presented as a benefit. It…
100% of profits support our journalism
