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.?…
Poland will mark, for the first time in history, the deportation of 250,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camp Treblinka. Events throughout the city will take place on Sunday to coincide with the date that, some seventy years ago, the Warsaw Ghetto was cleared out and gas chambers at Treblinka were activated….
Sabbath morning services at the synagogues of black congregations are unique because of their African-American cultural elements. But they are by no means uniform. ?We distinctly avoid trying to standardize our services,? Rabbi Yeshurun ben Levy of Beth Shalom Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of Brooklyn said. ?Every community can follow its own preferences.? Read the Forward?s…
We discovered recently that Israeli intelligence operatives have been active inside Iran, engaged in secret and dangerous missions aimed at stopping that country?s nuclear program. Although no Israeli government spokesman has confirmed such activities, our sources say that Israelis ? not Iranian dissidents or other paid mercenaries ? carried out the assassinations of at least…
Victoria Cantor writes: ?Whenever someone embarks on a journey, my cousins all sing a Yiddish song that goes, ?Lumen zikh ke zegena yush ke forte a veck! Hey! Hey! Hey!? Have you any thoughts or ideas as to its origins?? The song Ms. Cantor is thinking of is ?Yoshke Fort Avek,? and the line she…
It is difficult, if not impossible, in this town to forget World War II, and that is a matter of not-inconsequential pride. The Resistance movement was born here, and the reminders are everywhere. The Maternity Hospital, a short walk from the city?s center, hid Jews in its basement, repelling Nazi searches with a sign that…
A portrait of the two most prominent Palestinian leaders – current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and former President Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004 – hangs in the conference room of the Palestinian Olympic Committee headquarters. The background of the portrait is a panorama of the Dome of the Rock in the Old City…
The widow of an Israeli athlete slain in the 1972 Munich massacre praised President Obama’s decision to join her campaign for a moment of silence at the London Olympic Games. Ankie Spitzer, widow of Andrei Spitzer, said she was “overwhelmed and thrilled” that Obama joined the growing campaign to honor the 11 victims of the…
The American Jewish Committee, a centrist pillar of America’s organized Jewish community, is breaking with the long-standing establishment consensus that settlements on the Israeli-occupied West Bank pose no impediment to peace. The committee, in a press release issued on July 12, affirmed the legality of settlements throughout the West Bank and rejected the notion that…
When culinary historians look back at the first two decades of the 21st century, they’ll no doubt conclude that this was the golden age of food trucks. Brightly colored trucks with kitschy names roll out onto the streets of cities across North America each day, dishing out delicacies like artisanal ice cream sandwiches, snacks from…
We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust By Ellen Cassedy University of Nebraska Press, 288 pages, $19.95 This past May, the remains of the Nazi-quisling head of Lithuania?s wartime Provisional Government (PG), Juozas Brazaitis, were ceremoniously disinterred from Putnam, Conn., where he was buried in 1974, and reinterred a few days later in Kaunas,…
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