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His Hasidic Toy Story
Samuel Lipschitz, 27, grinned as a pint-sized red smart car pulled up next to the curb outside his toy store on Lee Avenue in Brooklyn. Lacquered onto the side of the car was a children’s cartoon character: a freckled, round-faced boy with curly brown peyes, or sidelocks, and a yarmulke. “What Walt Disney did to…
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Rabbi Performs Controversial Metzitzah B’Peh Circumcision Rite — Law or No
After cutting off the infant’s foreskin, Rabbi Avrohom Cohn leaned down toward the baby boy who was cradled on a white pillow atop his grandfather’s knee. Standing fully over the child, with his back to the dozens of immaculately dressed guests at the Syrian Jewish gathering in Brooklyn, it was impossible to see what Cohn…
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Winnipeg Jewish Community Seeks New Blood — With Mixed Results
(JTA) — When the leaders of Winnipeg’s Jewish federation sat down 13 years ago to try to figure out a way to reverse the community’s decline, they came up with a novel idea: recruit Jews from overseas. The idea was pretty straightforward. Capitalizing on the pro-immigration policies of their home province of Manitoba, the Winnipeg…
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Philadelphia Feud Erupts Over Federation Embrace of Anti-J Street Film
J Street, the dovish Israel lobby that has struggled for acceptance in the wider Jewish community, is facing its greatest challenge yet. In the coming weeks, the Jewish establishment’s most prominent gatekeepers will vote on whether J Street can come under the proverbial communal tent. The odds of success for J Street’s bid to join…
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Yeshiva U. Faces Long Fight To Reverse Fiscal Rot
Yeshiva University’s financial turnaround will take years even if the school can correct longstanding fiscal mismanagement by its own leadership, according to a stark report from Moody’s Investor Services. The ratings agency released the report on March 25 to explain the “rapid deterioration” of Y.U.’s credit rating, which has plunged from a high investment grade…
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Is Tikkun Olam Enough to Counter Jesus?
The Seesaw is a new kind of advice column in which a a broad range of columnists will address the real life issues faced by interfaith couples and families. Join the discussion by commenting on this post, sharing it on Facebook or following the Forward on Twitter. And keep the questions coming. You can email…
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Jewish Oligarch Vadim Rabinovich Announces Run for Ukraine President
The brash Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Vadim Rabinovich has announced that he will run for the presidency of Ukraine, according to the Interfax news agency. Rabinovich, president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress and founder of the European Jewish Parliament, said that he was running to “destroy the myth about anti-Semitism in Ukraine.” In recent months, Russian…
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How Stanley Cohen Went From Orthodox to Defending bin Laden’s Son-In-Law
Leaflets handed out near the Manhattan courthouse, where Stanley L. Cohen is defending a relative of Osama bin Laden, describe the Jewish attorney as a “traitor” and an “enemy of Jews, Israel and America.” Similar fliers were distributed around his Lower East Side loft. But for Cohen, who has spent much of his career representing…
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Uganda’s Century-Old Jewish Community Riven by Sectarian Divide
(JTA) — On Fridays at sundown, the Jewish residents of this village set amid the lush hills of eastern Uganda gather in the synagogue to greet Shabbat. The room is bare, the light is dim and the Conservative prayer books are worn. But the spare surroundings do little to diminish the enthusiasm of the men,…
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What’s a Jewish Town Doing in the Middle of ‘Madame Bovary?’
The other day, a French friend who lives in Israel used the expression quel capharnaüm to describe the state of her apartment after her small grandchildren had come for a visit. What she meant was, “What a mess,” but to my surprise, when I told her she had used a most appropriate word for Hebrew-speaking…
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Rena Arshinoff, Nurse and Rabbi, Guides Couple Through Delivery of Stillborn Child
In November 2012, Renan Levine and Mira Victoria Perry were eagerly awaiting the birth of their second child. Two days before the scheduled C-section, the Toronto couple received the news expectant parents dread most: their child had died in utero. With no family in the area and their synagogue rabbi out of town, the couple…
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News Exclusive: ADL chief compares student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaida in address to Republican officials
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Culture I ranked the NYC mayoral candidates exclusively based on their bagel orders
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