New York City’s most radical city councilman could end up representing the city’s most politically conservative Jewish community in the U.S. Congress. In an only-in-Brooklyn clash, New York City Council member Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, has a realistic chance of winning a June 26 Democratic primary that could send him to congress representing…
The Jewish population of the New York City area grew to 1.5 million in the past decade, driven by rapid growth among the Orthodox that is quickly transforming the face of the biggest Jewish community in the country, according to a landmark study released on June 12. More than six out of ten Jewish children…
Palestinian refugees, longtime pawns in regional and international struggles, have recently become a factor in American politics, as well. An attempt by the U.S. Senate to define who exactly can be counted as a Palestinian refugee has pitted congressional Republicans and some Israel advocates against the Obama administration. The measure, an amendment to the defense…
Video: Nate Lavey After years of decay and neglect, the Jewish cemetery in Tunis is overgrown, unkempt and could be declared ‘abandoned’ by the Tunisian government a status that could result in its redevelopment. The fate of the cemetery rests on a few caretakers like Joseph Krief, a native-born Tunisian Jew, who has tried for…
About 10,000 Jewish men fought in the Civil War, for both the Union and Confederate armies. When these soldiers set off for battle, they left behind their wives, sisters and daughters, who stayed to raise the children and run the households and, sometimes, the family businesses. But not all these women stayed focused on only…
A group of cadets and midshipmen from U.S. military academies are cleaning up a Jewish cemetery near Auschwitz as part of a Holocaust education initiative. The 14 students from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard cleared weeds and brush this week in the Jewish cemetery in Oswiecim, the town outside of which Auschwitz…
At a recent annual convention for Jewish cemetery officials, a New York State cemetery regulator asked attendees to share cemeteries’ biggest problems. One Connecticut cemetery manager talked about occult practitioners leaving sewn-up cow tongues and mutilated chickens around the graves. Another mentioned cash-strapped people seeking to disinter their dead parents so that they could sell…
Ask those in the know who the highest paid executives at Jewish not-for-profits are, and you are likely to hear about salaries at groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center or any number of big-city Jewish federations. But as it turns out, a Jewish executive at a not-for-profit cemetery in northern New…
Video: Nate Lavey A year and a half after the ouster of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the president of the Tunisian Jewish community is wistful for the one-party government that ruled the country for decades. “You cannot find a better government than what we had,” said Roger Bismuth, who has held the…
In their recent crafting of gay and lesbian marital rites, three Conservative rabbis altered the most fundamental piece of the traditional Jewish marriage ceremony: the liturgy of kiddushin. But rather than feel excluded, some gay Jews say they are relieved to be exempt from kiddushin, the part of the ceremony in which one partner —…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with Nate Lavey about his recent trip to Tunisia and the status of the country’s Jews. Then, Josh reports back on his recent trip to a cemetery convention where concerns ranged from how to handle trusts to missing bodies, voodoo and cow tongues. Finally, editor Jane Eisner…
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