Forward 50 2017
Trump’s (Un-)Orthodox Negotiator Is Surprising The Middle East With Some Quiet Successes The arrival of Jason Greenblatt to the international stage was inauspicious, to say the least. Moments into one of his first interviews with Jewish reporters, in April 2016, Donald Trump asked his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to fetch two Jewish members of his…
Giving The People Of The Book Children’s Books By The Thousands It’s not every 80-something philanthropist who puts his daughter-in-law in charge of the multimillion dollar foundation that bears his name. But then, Harold Grinspoon is not your average philanthropist. And Winnie Sandler Grinspoon is not your average daughter-in-law. The elder Grinspoon — 88 years…
The President’s Rabbi The rise of Donald Trump has been very good to Marvin Hier, founder and leader of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. Hier has been an oft-noisy voice on the national Jewish scene since the 1970s. But the months since Trump’s inauguration have seen him ascend from the rank and file of…
The Hillel Leader Who Puts Students In The Driver’s Seat Most Jewish students weighing which college to attend would be forgiven for assuming that Hillels are the same across the country — the same organizational structure, the same events, even the same food. But thanks to Executive Director Rabbi Yonah Schiller, Tulane Hillel is one…
The Queen of Jewish Cooking With the 2017 publication of “King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking From Around the World” (Alfred P. Knopf), Joan Nathan has used her status as the queen of Jewish cooking to reveal an unexpectedly wide and varied world of Jewish food. Having covered the Jewish Ashkenazi culinary…
Joey Siegel was against bringing the “alt-right” provocateur Mike Cernovich to Columbia University, but was overruled by his fellow members of the College Republicans student executive board. The fears of Siegel, who was slammed in threatening campus flyers that were plastered across campus, were proved correct when Cernovich drew what one security official described as…
Exactly five centuries ago, Martin Luther sparked what would become the Protestant Reformation by nailing a list of criticisms on a church door in Germany. Luther decried what he saw as abusive and corrupt practices in the Roman Catholic church — but reserved a very special kind of hatred for Jews, whom he branded an…
The Times’s Ace Trump Reporter Maggie Haberman scoops are like thunderstorms in August: They roll in nearly every afternoon, and they astound you every time. No reporter has burrowed so deeply into President Trump’s head as Haberman, one of The New York Times’ White House correspondents, and the unquestioned journalistic superstar of the Trump era….
He Fled The Nazis, Then Proved Einstein’s Theory Rainer Weiss fled Nazi Germany with his family when he was 6 years old. Nearly 80 years later, he won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. Growing up in Brooklyn, Weiss took to building hi-fi radio sets out of junk parts, prefiguring the scrappiness and inventiveness that…
Charlottesville’s Mayor Spoke Out After Hateful Rally A college professor and small-town mayor, Mike Signer never planned to be at the center of a national controversy. But hours after Charlottesville, Virginia, witnessed a deadly attack following hours of neo-Nazi marches, Signer was thrust into the spotlight, faulting the Trump White House for empowering these groups….
Just Your Typical Jewish Chinese Percussionist Food Blogger In North Dakota If you’re going to write a cookbook based on a personal and popular blog, then the expectation — rightly so — is that the book will reflect its author’s point of view and personality. Molly Yeh’s cookbook, “Molly on the Range,” takes her confessional…
