For President Obama and the Jews, it’s starting to look like 2008 all over again. A new survey of Jews shows 62% plan to vote for the president, roughly similar to where he stood at this time four years ago when he went on to garner nearly 80% of the Jewish vote in November. About…
Kenneth Libo, an award-winning American historian of the Jewish immigrant experience and a former editor at the Forward in the early 1980s, died in Manhattan on March 29 of complications from a fall following a period of ill health. He was 74. Born in Norwich, Conn., Libo, grew up on a chicken farm, his Jewish…
When an Arab Supreme Court justice stood silent instead of singing the national anthem at a public ceremony in late February, it sparked a furor on Israel’s nationalist right. Some lawmakers said that the judge, Salim Joubran, should be dismissed, and Yisrael Beiteinu’s David Rotem went so far as to claim that he “spat in…
Australia reportedly plans to seek the extradition of an imprisoned former Jewish studies teacher to face charges of child abuse dating back nearly 20 years. David Kramer, 51, is currently in a Missouri jail after being convicted of sodomizing a 12-year-old boy in 2008. He was sentenced to seven years in prison but is about…
It has been 90 years since Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan had his eldest daughter, Judith, stand before his congregation and read part of the week’s Torah portion in Hebrew and in English — making her the first American girl to publicly celebrate her bat mitzvah. It was nothing like bat mitzvahs of today: She read from…
Rachel Brook, a 29-year-old vocalist living in Brooklyn, was born to a Jewish Israeli father and a non-Jewish mother. After her parents divorced when she was 3, Brook was raised by her father as a Jew in a Reform synagogue. Last year, she decided to apply to cantorial school at the Academy for Jewish Religion,…
A Palestinian member of an Israeli soccer team was knocked out during a brawl at the end of the game. Ali Khatib of Hapoel Haifa, who also plays for the Palestinian national team, was hit in the face and kicked while he was on the ground, allegedly by members of the Maccabi Petah Tikvah team’s…
Decades before Jon Stewart brought his popular admixture of satire and journalism to the mass media on Comedy Central, the unique hybrid of the two genres could be found regularly in only one very hip and often outrageous media outlet. But Paul Krassner, the self-described “investigative satirist” who pretty much invented the form in his…
While international attention is focused on relations between Jews and Muslims in Europe, following the Toulouse shooting, attempts are under way to strengthen ties between the two religious communities in another region: Latin America. A group of Muslim and Jewish leaders from Latin American and Caribbean nations came to Washington on March 26 as a…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with Forward opinion editor Gal Beckerman and Forward Fellow Naomi Zeveloff about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions vote at an iconic New York food co-op and Peter Beinart’s new book in which he argues for “Zionist BDS.” Then staff writer Paul Berger drops by to discuss a…
The sanctuary of Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue was packed for the March 18 celebration of Rabbi Arthur Schneier’s 50th anniversary as the leader of the congregation. Israel’s consul general, Ido Aharoni, a congregant, quipped, “I was born when you were installed.” He went on to praise the rabbi as “integral to the Jewish life of…
