“We welcomed her with open arms. She came to shul regularly,” David Gaffney, rabbi at the Conservative Synagogue of Fifth Avenue, said of actress and singer-songwriter Mare Winningham, who had visited the synagogue in years past. We (the rabbi, his wife, my daughter and I) had just seen Winningham perform on July 16 in a…
Solomon Krishef was thrilled to learn that this summer he could go to his Jewish sleepaway camp for eight weeks – twice as long as the previous four summers. It was not to be for the Michigan teenager. During visiting day in the middle of the summer, his family says, the camp director told them…
President Obama’s re-election hopes received a major boost when two Jewish mega-donors ponied up a total of $3 million to pro-Democratic super political action committees. Qualcomm founder Irwin Mark Jacobs and Saban Capital Group Chairman and CEO Haim Saban, who had been on the fence about backing Obama’s re-election, made separate donations to the nominally…
Abe George seems an unlikely roadblock in Charles Hynes’s drive to a seventh term as Brooklyn’s district attorney. George, 33, has no heavy-hitting political backers, no name recognition and, so far, very little campaign money. He is the son of Indian immigrants in a city where no South Asian has ever won citywide or boroughwide…
One unlikely venue for fallout from the Penn State University sex abuse scandal is the campus Hillel, for which now ousted university president Graham Spanier – the school’s first Jewish leader – was a fundraiser and vocal supporter. On Tuesday, the Penn State community was stunned when the NCAA levied a $60 million fine against…
There?s a lot of drama in Israel. That?s no surprise, of course, given the drama throughout the Middle East. Perhaps less expected is that there?s comedy, musicals and, as we?ll see late in July, reality, too. On July 26, CBS debuts ?3,? a reality TV show it describes as a ?relationship series in which three…
Video: Nate Lavey Goshen, the fabled Egyptian area that the ancient Israelites settled and farmed when famine struck the Holy Land, was so fertile, according to the Bible, that the Israelites multiplied at rates that made the Pharaohs afraid. It?s hard to see Goshen, N.Y., in the foothills of the Catskills, as the locus of…
The ordination took place on a sun-drenched Sabbath, in a synagogue used many decades ago by Lithuanian Jews. But on June 23, it was 200 mostly black worshippers, many in brightly colored African dress, who were on their feet, eyes fixed on a procession of eight white-robed rabbis with ceremonial miters crowning their heads as…
Until this week, leaders of Bulgaria’s small, generally placid Jewish community said they felt untouched by hate crimes or terrorism. But after Wednesday’s apparent suicide bombing of a bus carrying Israeli tourists in the Black Sea city of Borgas, Jews in the country are speaking of a basic change in their sense of security. “We…
Iran's Olympics team is threatening a boycott because it believes the 2012 Olympics logo is as a Zionist plot.
Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me By Harvey Pekar and J.T. Waldman Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 176 pages, $24.95 A central question for fans of famed comics writer Harvey Pekar, who passed away in 2010, was whether he would produce a sequel to his 1978 classic, ?Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines.?…
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