Leftist Jewish groups are calling on a Long Island synagogue to cancel a speech by an outspoken Jewish blogger known for her outspoken anti-Muslim views — raising questions about a double standard on free expression. New York activist groups Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Jews Say No! announced their…
On March 7, at 6:10 a.m., a van and an SUV sit in adjacent parking spaces in the lot of a McDonald’s near the junction of the 101 and the 405 freeways, their rear lift-gates open. Mike Engelman, the driver of the SUV, with the help of the driver of the van, loads something into…
“You’ll walk out of this room with a slightly different brain than you walked into it, because of [the evening’s] experience,” said neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize winner and the recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award, at the JBC’s National Book Award Ceremony, held on March 14 at the Center for Jewish…
Aaron walked into our lives on the day of my next-to-youngest son’s bar mitzvah. The services and the Kiddush reception were over; I was cleaning up, shoving plates of half-eaten cakes I’d baked myself into garbage bags, when he turned up on the arm of Shimon, one of our guests. “We can’t have Aaron for…
The real estate developer who helped prosecutors crack a wide-ranging corruption case involving six prominent New York politicians is reportedly a key Orthodox power broker in an upstate Jewish community. Moses Stern, a member of the Satmar Hasidic community in upstate Monsey, was the central figure in the FBI sting that led to the April…
When Rabbi Jim Diamond was killed suddenly and unexpectedly, it was just moments after taking leave from the very activity that defined him as a scholar: a Talmud study session. Our Talmud study group in Princeton, N.J. met every Thursday over breakfast — six men, including three rabbis and three civilians. We usually met at…
As the new head of The Israel Project, Josh Block brings an aggressive, in-your-face style of operation to one of the Jewish community’s fastest-growing organizations, even as the group undergoes sweeping changes with his arrival. It’s an approach that contrasts strikingly with that of his predecessor, TIP founder Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, under whose tenure the…
Are some New York City hospitals and the city’s Department of Health suppressing disclosure of cases in which a dangerous herpes virus is being transmitted by mohels to newborns? Representatives from New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center refused to respond to this allegation — made specifically about their own hospital — by a senior…
When Austrian and German Jews escaped Nazism by fleeing to Britain during the 1930s, the last thing they expected was to find themselves prisoners in Canada, interred in camps with some of the same Nazis they had tried to escape back home. But that’s what happened to some 7,000 European Jews and “Category A” prisoners…
It is a painfully cold day as a light snow falls on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and on its immediate neighbor, the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Inside the museum, nearly 100 workers are putting the finishing touches on the near-completed building. The undulating walls are painted…
Reconstructionist Judaism is suddenly leaderless, six months into a dramatic effort to save the movement through a reorganization of its key institutions. In the sweeping membership crisis that has rocked North America’s non-Orthodox Jewish denominations in the past decade, perhaps no denomination has faced greater peril than the Reconstructionists. During its half century of existence,…
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