KIEV, Ukraine — The local municipality of a small city in Ukraine is refusing to stop construction of an apartment building atop a Jewish cemetery there. Local officials in Volodymyr-Volynskyi are defying a December 17 appeals court decision that followed five years of legal battles waged by the Jewish community in Ukraine, with the help…
As the 2004 presidential race gets under way, Senator Joseph Lieberman appears to have damaged his support among hawkish and Orthodox Jews with statements he made during a recent trip to the Middle East. At news conferences during the trip, the Connecticut lawmaker expressed support for a Palestinian state, deplored poor humanitarian conditions in the…
We’re already into the new year, but in this column it’s still Christmas. Our discussion of nitl two weeks ago needs to be continued. In the first place, two readers, Mark Friedman and Harvey Gertel, have written in to help explain the traditional Eastern European Jewish custom, referred to by me, of playing cards on…
SAN FRANCISCO — From the outset, few expected that last year’s merger of two Bay Area Jewish museums would go off without a hitch. But following a second round of cost-reducing staff cuts by the combined institutions’ CEO and a flood of angry letters and comments in the local media, the merger of the venerable…
The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor’s Son By Sholem Aleichem Translated by Hillel Halkin Yale, 325 pages, $29.95. * * *| The World According to Itzik: Selected Prose and Poetry By Itzik Manger Translated by Leonard Wolf Yale, 249 pages, $29.95. * * *| In the past hundred years, two Yiddish…
A series of assaults against a Paris rabbi may be the work of an organized group rather than the latest in a long list of seemingly spontaneous antisemitic acts, say French Jewish communal officials. Rabbi Gabriel Farhi, 34, was lightly wounded when he was attacked in his Reform synagogue on Rue Pétion last Friday by…
Joseph Green is the Steven Spielberg of Yiddish filmmakers. During the 1930s, he directed four Yiddish-language films on location in Poland — lyrical Old World tales that depicted a culture in which “shtetl” and “samovar” were as recognizable as “Brooklyn Bridge” and “bagels” are to New Yorkers today. On the occasion of the 12th Annual…
WASHINGTON — Aaron David Miller remembers with painful clarity the moment he despaired of helping Israelis and Palestinians achieve the peaceful settlement toward which he spent most of his career working. It came during a call on his cell phone last March. A senior adviser for Arab-Israeli negotiations in the State Department, Miller was celebrating…
In Chapter 56, Leonid stumbled upon a possible path to legitimacy over a clandestine burger with Brooke. * * *| The papers were dripping with Schadenfreude. The fall of Neil Maguire was the lead editorial in all of the papers, even the local Arabic-language paper, which a translator had kindly placed in the pile that…
Andre Cherbuliez is a lean, spare man of average height, completely bald, with astonishingly elastic, expressive features evocative of the young Yul Brynner. I came to the offices of the Allseas Shipping Company last month to talk with Cherbuliez about our shared alma mater, the International School of Geneva. Cherbuliez, now 73, attended the school…
It seems quaint to recall how, a decade ago, some critics worried that Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” — with its overwhelming prestige, honors and box-office success — would squelch the future of Jewish filmmaking. In the past 10 years films on Jewish themes have shown remarkable growth in number, quality and significance, and the annual…
100% of profits support our journalism
