It was primary night, and Ed Koch was eating mussels. The 87-year-old former mayor had a corner table at an Italian restaurant on the West Side of Manhattan. At his elbow was John LoCicero, his political advisor since the 1960s. LoCicero was eating mussels, too. Primary polls were still open for another hour, but LoCicero,…
Video: Nate Lavey The strongest girl in the world is an Orthodox Jewish 10-year-old from Fair Lawn, N.J. Naomi Kutin, a soon-to-be sixth-grader at the Yeshivat Noam day school in Paramus, can lift more than twice her own 99 pounds. In January she set a world record for women in her weight class (then 97…
Israelis and their Summer Olympics athletes are eyeing the upcoming London Games with excitement and sadness. The athletes are hoping that for the sixth straight summer Games, at least one of them will come home with a medal. Yet they are well aware that the International Olympics Committee has again spurned the campaign to have…
The beleaguered Schechter Day School Network — an educational pillar of Conservative Judaism — is considering leaving its parent organization as it grapples with shrinking enrollment and shuttered schools, the Forward has learned. The Schechter network has been under the aegis of the movement’s congregational arm, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, since its founding…
Daniel Smith experiences the constant worrying one might expect of an air-traffic controller, a wartime president or a brain surgeon. But he is none of the above. Instead, he is the uneasy American Jewish author of a new book, “Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety” (Simon & Schuster), a clear-eyed tragicomic recap of his past…
Call it patriotism or doing something to express his Palestinian identity — Taisir Jubeh wanted to start a business in Jerusalem. So five months ago, after handing over the reins of his Ramallah bookshop to relatives, he opened a men’s casual wear store in the new Addar Shopping Mall, off Salah el-Din Street. The mall,…
Hours after it narrowly rejected divestment from some companies that do business with Israel, the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to endorse a boycott of products made in the occupied West Bank. The church’s general assembly also cleared the way for a vote in 2014 to establish an Israel occupation-free “conscience plan” for participants in its…
In this week’s podcast, host Naomi Zeveloff talks with editor-in-chief Jane Eisner and contributor Elissa Strauss about a recent discussion about how women can manage work and family life. Then, Ben Lynfield calls in from Jerusalem to discuss why East Jerusalem is in an economic tailspin and how it is affecting residents there. <strong>Subscribe to…
The New York Academy of Medicine’s 18th Annual Gala honored builder and Rudin Management chairman Jack Rudin and his wife, Susan Rudin, with an Urban Health Champion Award for “their many contributions toward making New York City a healthy and safe place for its residents.” Describing the Rudin family’s extensive civic accomplishments, NYAM’s president, Jo…
Jewish institutions throughout the United States will receive $9.7 million in federal anti-terrorism grants this year out of a total of $10 million allocated to not-for-profit institutions by the Department of Homeland Security. That’s $6 million less than last year. But thanks to sharp cuts this year in the overall pool of money available through…
Poland has just reopened a 71-year-old case involving the rape and murder of 20 Jewish women. In the 1941 case — in the midst of World II, and two years after the Nazi invasion of Poland — six Poles allegedly beat the Jewish women to death with metal-tipped clubs outside the hamlet of Bzury, in…
