Brenda Naomi Rosenberg had had it with denunciations of Israel, and she told her Muslim dialogue partner so, right to her face. “Israel has the responsibility to defend itself from Hamas rockets!” she exclaimed. But Samia Moustapha Bahsoun, a Muslim of Lebanese descent who was raised in Senegal, had had it with that talking point….
With the Nov. 24 deadline for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program looming, Vice President Joe Biden vowed that the United States “will not sign a bad deal.” “Let me say to you clearly in Bidenesque way: We will not let Iran acquire a nuclear weapon – period,” he said in an address Monday to the…
A Palestinian activist was found guilty on Monday of immigration fraud for failing to reveal to U.S. authorities that she had been convicted and served time in Israel for a 1969 supermarket bombing that killed two people. After a trial last week in a federal court in Detroit, Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, 67, was convicted of…
(JTA) — Even amid the unceasing horrors of Sierra Leone’s Ebola epidemic, it was a case that stood out. A 5-year-old boy had been found in his home in a remote village, the lone survivor in a house riddled with the corpses of family members. He needed to be extracted; the bodies needed to be…
Supreme Court justices Stephen Breyer and Elana Kagan talked about their Jewish identities at the opening plenary of the 2014 General Assembly conference of the Jewish Federations of North America. Speaking before a crowd of more than 2,000 at the conference center just outside Washington, Breyer said the most remarkable thing about there being three…
General managers of opera companies, even ones as prestigious as the Metropolitan Opera, rarely find themselves on the front pages of tabloid newspapers. But it isn’t every year that the Met chooses to showcase “The Death of Klinghoffer,” the opera by John Adams with a libretto by Alice Goodman that dramatizes the murder of a…
Leah Vincent, 32, became the new face of the burgeoning ex-Orthodox community this year with the publication of her feted memoir, “Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood.” Vincent is just one of several formerly Orthodox authors to tell their stories in recent books. But in addition to describing her own experiences,…
Shmuel Lefkowitz, 68, leads the Orthodox fight to allow Jewish people to die according to their religious beliefs. But as the Forward showed this year, Lefkowitz’s organization, Chayim Aruchim, also believes in challenging a patient’s or relative’s wishes if those wishes contravene Jewish law. In one case, a lawyer to whom Chayim Aruchim refers cases…
Saul Zabar is not a romantic. “There’s nothing poetic about this business,” he told The New York Times in 2008. Try telling that to the crowds swarming his Upper West Side store each Friday: grandmas shoving yuppies, yuppies shoving grandmas, everyone salivating over the lox. Zabar’s turns 80 this year, and Saul Zabar, its 86-year-old…
The script could not have been written better for Cleveland Cavaliers basketball coach David Blatt. On May 18, the 55-year-old veteran coach led the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv to an unexpected Euroleague championship over favorites, Real Madrid. On June 20, the Cleveland Cavaliers hired him to be their next head coach, fulfilling his longtime…
Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, a flourishing network of charter schools in New York City that teaches nearly 9,500 mostly low-income black and Latino students. By skirting the control of the teachers union and creating highly disciplined, serious environments for students, Moskowitz’s schools have managed to outscore on…
