When The Times of Israel, a new Web-only, English-language Israeli newspaper, hit the Internet in February, its glossy design and professional graphics moved many to wonder what well-heeled backer might be behind this latest entry into Israel’s crowded media market. As it turns out, Seth Klarman, another wealthy American Jewish investor, is following in the…
Mitt Romney will address the annual AIPAC policy conference. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee announced Tuesday via Twitter that Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and a candidate for the Republican presidential nod, will address its policy conference on March 6, the day voters go to the polls in 10 states in the Super Tuesday…
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan decried what he called Jewish control of the media and accused “Zionists” of trying to push America into war with Iran. Farrakhan spoke for three hours Sunday before a crowd of thousands at the 82nd annual Saviors’ Day celebration in Chicago. In his address, along with the accusation about…
Even as Orthodox women take on clergy-like roles, the task of interpreting Jewish law has long been the exclusive domain of men. But a new group called Beit Hillel aims to bring down that barrier. An alliance of 120 Orthodox rabbis and 30 female religious scholars, Beit Hillel was formed to counter the increasingly hard…
With tension between Jerusalem and Washington on the rise over the preferred policy for dealing with Iran, supporters of Israel are urging lawmakers to back a resolution moving the goalposts in this debate closer to the views of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. A proposed Senate resolution, supported by the pro-Israel lobby, would shift America’s red line…
The debate over circumcision has spread to Colorado, where two lawmakers are seeking to reinstate Medicaid funding for the procedure after it was cut last year. The proposal, which is snaking its way through the state legislature, has sparked a broader conversation about circumcision in Colorado and beyond, with Jews on both sides of the…
The American Jewish community has always seemed uneasy about the case of Alan P. Gross. On the one hand, he is an American citizen, a Jew from suburban Washington who was arrested in Cuba in 2009 for doing nothing worse — so Gross’s supporters claim — than trying to improve telephone and Internet services for…
Ira Cohen was a filmmaker, photographer and poet, but many people would agree that Cohen’s most amazing work of art was himself. A self-described “multimedia shaman,” Cohen passed away in April 2011. Jon Kalish reports from the Living Theatre on New York’s Lower East Side, where Cohen’s friends and admirers gathered this past month to…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with Forward artist in residence Eli Valley about his newest comic in which a sea monster visits the AIPAC conference. Then, staff writer Paul Berger talks about the ongoing saga of Alan Gross, a Jewish American aid worker who is serving a 15-year prison sentence in Cuba….
A government program tailored to provide security grants for Jewish institutions is facing deep cuts and changes that will eliminate the advantage those institutions had in bidding for the federal grants. Guidelines issued on February 17 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security eliminate a built-in preference for religious groups that was among the reasons…
Ultra-Orthodox reactions to a High Court of Justice ruling overturning the Tal Law, which exempts tens of thousands of yeshiva students from military service, ranged yesterday from utter indifference to prophecies of Armageddon. The High Court ruled on Tuesday that the law, which allows full-time yeshiva students to defer army service, is unconstitutional, and the…
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