During the launch of New York City’s shared bicycle program this week, shiny kiosks throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn have been surrounded by curious gawkers examining the bulky blue bikes that can be rented and returned at multiple locations with at least one notable exception — the Hasidic-dominated neighborhood of South Williamsburg. As Brooklyn has been…
In this week’s Reporters Roundtable podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis is joined by Forward contributor Jay Michaelson to talk about his recent, controversial piece on Jewish fundamentalism and the ultra-Orthodox. Then, Nate Lavey drops by to discuss his video on a classic Brooklyn hat store and their century-old equipment. Finally, Susan Armitage gives a brief history…
The chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Julius Berman, has hit out at media coverage and Jewish communal criticism of his handling of a 2001 letter that could have stopped a multi-million dollar fraud at the organization he has led for more than 10 years. READ THE FORWARD’S RESPONSE TO BERMAN’S…
For much of its existence, the Village Voice was a paper where you could call a momzer a momzer and use just that term to do it. But the news in May that the out-of-town momzers who own the Voice had fired the paper’s last remaining signature writers — Michael Feingold, Michael Musto and Robert…
Over the past few weeks, strangers have begun stopping high school computer science teacher Chaim Cohen on the street. A few accuse him of recording them without their knowledge. Even fewer blame him for all of society’s ills. But many just want an answer to a simple question: Is he wearing Google Glass? Cohen is…
Jerick Hoffer, also known as Jinkx Monsoon, is the most recent winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Logo TV’s reality competition in which contestants compete to become America’s “Next Drag Superstar.” Originally from Portland, Ore., Hoffer, 25, has been performing in drag for 10 years. He configured Jinkx Monsoon as “the hardest working single mother in…
February 2010 was a time of high tension for top officials at the Jewish organization that processes restitution claims for Holocaust survivors. Just three months earlier, they had discovered the existence of what would turn out to be a massive, multimillion-dollar fraud taking place at the agency, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany….
When Muslims tour Auschwitz and other sites of the Jewish Holocaust, and encounter survivors of that genocide face-to-face, the points of connection they make can be quite unpredictable. For Barakat Fawzi Hasan, a Palestinian assistant professor in Islamic Education at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, a moment of clarity came as he and his co-religionists listened,…
The top echelons of the Chabad movement are on the verge of a once-in-a-generation leadership transition. The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement never replaced its spiritual leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, after he died in 1994 at the age of 92. Yet a coterie of gray-bearded rabbis picked by Schneerson continues to run the movement from its headquarters…
He will welcome you into his earthen-floor home, introduce you to his three wives, and let you sample their cooking. But Dougoutigo Fadiga does not want foreigners to come near the sacred tree of his village deep in the Senegalese bush. “The tree is holy grounds,” says Fadiga, president of this remote settlement of 4,000…
Chabad in Milan is preparing to launch what is said to be the first kosher soup kitchen in Italy. Sponsored by the Milan branch of Chabad’s educational organization, Merkos l’Inyonei Chinuch, it is expected to begin operation at the end of the summer. The initiative will be a canteen providing free take-away meals to needy…
