‘I’m doing this because I love you,” my mother insisted. For decades she tried to prepare me for her inevitable demise. Long before she succumbed to dementia, in between golf tournaments, she’d drag me to the bank vault every time I visited her in Florida, to give me a private tour of her safety deposit…
Born only a year after the National Party came to power in 1948, I grew up in a South Africa that was deeply and obscenely divided. An intricate system, built on centuries of colonialism and segregation, defined every aspect of life: place of residence, education, health prospects, career opportunities, sports and ordinary daily movement. Harsh…
Mikhl Baran grew up with Yiddish. Now 91, he says of Oshmiany, the town in Lithuania where he was born, “Even the stones spoke Yiddish in our little shtetl.” Anthony Russell discovered the language in his thirties. A gay, African-American singer of opera, he stumbled across Yiddish cantorial singing during a mid-career crisis, and says…
Spain and Italy bring to five the number of major European Union countries warning citizens against investment in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Haaretz reported on Thursday that the countries joined France, Germany and Britain in issuing such advisories this year. France posted its warning earlier this week…
(Haaretz) — The most outrageous snapshots from any given Pride parade tend to be the most popular – six-foot drag queens (seven, if you count heels and hair,) chiseled go-go dancers in mini-Speedos, loads of glitter. It is an event that has come to be defined by party boys. But ahead of New York Pride…
To this day, Leo Melamed recalls vividly the first thing his mother did when his family walked off the boat at the small Japanese port city of Tsuruga. “She told me that she can now let go of my hand,” Melamed recalled. “She held my hand for two years straight.” It was the first safe…
(JTA) — Josh Orlian cracked up the judges on “America’s Got Talent,” but his Orthodox day school wasn’t laughing. The 12-year-old kippah-wearing comic made his national television debut with a raunchy routine packed with sexual innuendo. The show’s celebrity judges and studio audience seemed both stunned and entertained by the pre-bar-mitzvah-age cut-up’s dirty jokes. While…
Ninety-year-old Sonia Anger survived the Nazis by fleeing Romania after the Germans invaded in 1941 and taking refuge in the Ural Mountains. Today, the brown-haired, 5-foot-6-inch widow struggles to survive in New York City on a monthly Social Security check of $1,130, or $14,000 a year. “I’m sweeping the floor, and have little to eat,…
(Haaretz) — The claim that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the Middle Ages is a myth, according to new research by a Hebrew University historian. The Khazar thesis gained global prominence when Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University published “The Invention of the Jewish People” in 2008. In that…
(Reuters) — Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen wants to see U.S. wages climb at a much brisker clip to boost consumer spending and help workers recoup ground they lost in the last recession, but she’ll have to fend off policymakers who fear that could cause inflation to surge. As she seeks to maintain a consensus…
When World War I broke out 100 years ago this summer, Forverts Editor Abraham Cahan predicted “a frightful bloodletting.” Under the stark headline “Milkhome” (War), Cahan wrote: “War means a retreat backwards, a return to darkness.” June 28 will mark the centennial of the spark that ignited that war: the assassination of the Austrian archduke,…
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