More than 2,000 survivors attended the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s daylong program of Holocaust-related films and workshops at the New York Hilton on March 3. I was moved by actor Marc Spiegel’s one-man dramatization of the secret operation named Oneg Shabbat (Hebrew for Joy of Sabbath), a project undertaken by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum in…
Last week, at the glamorous Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces held its annual gala dinner. The FIDF’s national director, Maj. Gen. (res.) Yitzhak (Jerry) Gershon smiled beside wounded soldiers flown in from Israel to encourage guests to open their wallets. Gershon should be pleased: according to various reports, about…
The table is set; your Seder plate is ready, and on it is everything you need: the matzos, the ?shank bone,? the hardboiled egg, the ?bitter herb? of a horseradish root, the ?aroset or sweet condiment, and the karpas or celery. Or is it parsley? Of course, Jews wouldn?t be Jews if they agreed about…
When I was very young, my father told me bedtime stories that, looking back, may have helped me overcome my feeling that I couldn?t be both Jewish and a Westerner. Growing up in Utah, where Mormons tend to treat Jews as living Bible characters instead of real friends and neighbors, I often doubted the authenticity…
Julius Genachowski said on Friday he will step down as chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in the coming weeks after four years on the job, and touted his record of working to expand broadband Internet service to Americans. Genachowski, whose term was due to end in June, told FCC staffers he would be…
Steve Walk participated in his first men’s seder last year as a member of Temple Beth-El in Great Neck, N.Y. There was no exodus story, no matzo and no bitter herb. Instead, a moderator walked around with a freedom plate, encouraging participants to put down things they felt burdened them. Walk said someone put down…
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would ever meet the president of the United States,” said Titi Aynaw when she received an invitation to the state dinner given in honor of President Obama yesterday in Jerusalem. Not only did the recently crowned Miss Israel 2013 (and the first Ethiopian Israeli to bear…
As a man, I will never know what it is like to be a mother. I will certainly never know what it’s like to be a Hasidic woman expected to bear children year after year and withstand the challenges and pressures of motherhood — like the ones Judy Brown described so poignantly in her two…
In this week’s Reporters Roundtable podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis is joined by Forward Digital Features Editor Abigail Jones to discuss our crowdsourced list of 36 inspirational rabbis. Then, Forward Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman calls in to fill us in on President Obama’s trip to Israel. Finally, Josh talks Philip Roth and Newark with Nate Lavey,…
For a president of the United States, the personal is inevitably political. But there is one annual event at the White House that truly is personal for its current chief resident — or at least as personal as anything can be in the most watched building in the country. President Obama’s upcoming Passover Seder, scheduled…
Merryl Tisch Toasted by Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts “There are three paths to being an educator — a teacher, an academic or a policymaker,” Lincoln Center Chair Katherine Farley said of honoree Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, at the March 5 Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts…
די „שלום־עליכם לעקציע“ וועט מען קענען הערן אויפֿן אָרט אָדער דורך דער אינטערנעץ.
