The Upper West Side apartment of Shulamith Koenig, the founder of an international human rights organization, could double as a museum of art from around the world. A visual proof of the nomadic nature of her work — she’s visited 42 countries during the last 12 years — Koenig’s living room overflows with Turkish rugs,…
I always worry, when I’m writing this column, that people are rolling their eyes at my narcissism. Do I act as if I’m the first person ever to have a child? Am I annoyingly convinced that everything Josie does is brilliant and adorable? Am I the literary equivalent of your neighbor who constantly forces you…
SILVER SPRING, Md. — Neil and Fran Kritz are poster children for Modern Orthodoxy. Fran, a reporter for the Washington Post, won’t take a call from any source on the Sabbath. Neil, who is the director of the Rule of Law Program for the U.S. Institute of Peace, travels to war-torn countries to help rebuild…
Designating the Center for Jewish History “The Miracle on 16th Street,” its executive director, Joshua Plaut, welcomed guests to the center’s first board of directors and board of overseers’ fundraising dinner, held December 9 at its building. “We are kvelling at the success of our partner organizations,” Plaut said, alluding to the American Jewish Historical…
An association of 150 Reform rabbis is calling on the Reform movement to reconsider its decision to eliminate the jobs of 13 regional coordinators who provide services for interfaith families. The job cuts, announced last month by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to help relieve a $2 million budget deficit, would eliminate the part-time…
Every now and then, something genuinely funny comes through our e-mail inbox. Last week, we got “The Buchur,” a yeshiva-ized version of the hit television show “The Bachelor,” in which one smarmy single guy flits between a gaggle of girls going gaga at the chance to get engaged. The parody comes from bangitout.com, a Web…
JERUSALEM — It is by now a sad routine. Israel’s Friday newspapers report, on Page 3, that nine Palestinians, most of them armed, were killed in Israeli military actions the previous day. Sunday morning’s papers report on the Friday night shooting deaths of four Israelis, students at a paramilitary hesder yeshiva in the West Bank…
Bill Gladstone writes from Toronto: At last summer’s Jewish genealogy conference in Toronto, I was intrigued when one speaker, Yale Reisner, mentioned that certain Hebrew words had crept into the Polish language in pre-war Poland. For example, machloket, which as you know means a theological dispute (applied talmudically and rabbinically), was apparently used by Poles…
Last August, at the annual Yugntruf Youth for Yiddish retreat in Copake, N.Y., a bearded father pitched a softball to his developmentally disabled 8-year-old son, accompanying each toss with Yiddish words of encouragement. A young man with spiky hair approached the child and asked, “Vilst ikh zol dir vayzn?” (Do you want me to show…
STAMFORD, Conn. — Breaking a longstanding taboo, a leading Orthodox Jewish advocacy group held an open discussion at its national convention here last week that touched on the question of whether Orthodox communities might themselves be partly to blame when civic conflicts arise with their non-Jewish or non-Orthodox neighbors. The December 27 roundtable discussion at…
Eliezer Steinbarg (1880-1932) was a Yiddish Aesop in poetic form. And, as in the case of Aesop’s fables, the meaning of his allegories is as much dependent on the reader as on the writer. His contemporaries thought highly of him. One of them, the famous Hayyim Nahman Bialik, wrote: “Each fable has its own charm…
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