Jewish federation leaders are bracing for substantial cuts in government funding for the social services their agencies provide as attention turns toward deficit reduction following the presidential election. Just how much will depend on the outcome of the post-election debate now unfolding on President Obama’s proposal to increase tax rates on the wealthy to help…
A little-known New York City child care network that won a huge city contract for government-subsidized day care programs has had trouble paying its bills, the Forward has learned. Less than a month after the group — which is operated by a Hasidic rabbi — opened 20 new subsidized child care sites, it told employees…
Shortly before Emily Aviva Kapor began the transition from male to female, she sat down to discuss the process with her mother. “I told her I was going on hormones, and she said the most Jewish thing to me,” 27-year-old Kapor recalled. “She said, ‘Well, at least you’re not getting a tattoo.’” It’s a funny…
French police reportedly arrested a 21-year-old man suspected of scrawling “death to Jews” on a synagogue near Paris. The man is suspected of writing the message with a black marker on Nov. 7 or Nov. 8 on the entrance to the synagogue of Pantin in Seine-Saint-Denis near Paris, according to the municipality. The radio network…
Thanks to overwhelming support from a growing Puerto Rican community in Central Florida, Alan Grayson, the pugnacious Jewish Democrat ousted in the Tea Party wave of 2010, is returning to Congress after a historic landslide. Grayson’s success comes after the 18-point shellacking he took as an incumbent congressman two years ago. This time, he won…
After a decade of fighting a public school board dominated by Orthodox Jews in suburban New York, Oscar Cohen, a soft-spoken 71-year-old with a reputation for composure, is starting to get angry. “You have eight school districts in Rockland County,” the retired school administrator told the Forward recently. “One is cutting every nonmandated service to…
Think immigration through – again. Forget about gay marriage. And for heaven’s sake, when it comes to rape, shut up! The Republican Party as a whole is having the morning-afters, reconsidering how it might have done better in an election that saw the party fail to win the White House and suffer modest losses in…
In the first major post-election Jewish gathering, politics has been given a deliberately low profile. Instead, thousands of Jewish communal professionals gathered in Baltimore for the annual General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America were focused on social justice and tikkun olam, or repairing the world, as the conference opened. Issuing a strong…
Having won a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship implies that 35-year-old mathematician Maria Chudnovsky is a genius. But other committees have been explicit in calling her a “genius” — as well as “brilliant” and “distinguished” — when bestowing honors upon her. A conversation with the Columbia University professor isn’t all quantum theories and equations, though. In fact,…
Mark Yudof, 68, is one of the nation’s foremost free speech experts. And, as the president of the University of California, that means he often finds himself defending the free speech rights of those with whom he disagrees, such as harsh critics of Israel. The 10-campus system, which Yudof has overseen since 2008, is deeply…
Bruce Ratner may not have Barbra Streisand’s voice or Jay-Z’s rep on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant. But the developer had every right to trumpet himself as the King of Brooklyn after his long-delayed Barclays Center finally opened its doors. Ratner beamed as the arena opened to sold-out shows by Babs and hip-hop’s big- gest star,…
