A multimillion dollar nationwide advertising campaign featuring an inescapable radio jingle and a freckle-faced boy in a convertible has brought the Orthodox Jewish charity known as Kars4Kids more than 60,000 donated vehicles a year. Those gifts, worth $29 million, support Orthodox outreach to non-Orthodox Jews, including a fancy summer camp for Jewish children. But Kars4Kids…
Torn by internal strife, a leading conservative Jewish organization known for its hawkish views is struggling to find its footing after firing a key staffer and losing prominent members of its advisory board. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs recently terminated the second-highest-ranking staff member, who has been with the organization for more than…
Growing up Jewish in the suburbs of Chicago, I always harbored a bagel inferiority complex. The bagels I found at the grocery store and in the various bagel chains that sprouted in the 1980s and ’90s felt like impostors — swollen and tasteless and slathered with, of all ridiculous things, blueberry cream cheese. The bagels…
As Jews in some northern New Jersey communities made their way to synagogue last Shabbat, the scene was slightly different from the typical day of rest. Extra police cars were on patrol near synagogues. At Bnei Yeshurun in Teaneck, a new buzzer system had been installed. And at Ahavath Torah in Englewood, a phalanx of…
Two new independent studies have found that there are between 6.4 million and 6.6 million Jews living in the United States today, representing about 1.8% of the population. Though the studies used drastically different methodologies, they appear to point to a growing consensus on the number of Jews in America, a figure that has been…
Computer hackers disabled the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al websites. The attacks on Monday morning come after hackers over the last two weeks have released online the credit card details of thousands of Israelis and a day after Hamas called on hackers to attack Israeli sites. The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s website recovered…
Democrat Steve Cohen, the first Jewish congressman to represent a district in Tennessee, has lost a key constituency, the small Jewish community in Memphis, after the borders of his district were redrawn. Cohen’s Ninth District has been reshaped in a way that cut him off from most of the Jews living in Memphis. Even Cohen’s…
Sitting at the head of an expansive boardroom table at the luxury Setai hotel in Manhattan, Alexander Levin ponders the 300-square-foot room in Odessa, Ukraine, where he was raised. It is January 23, two days before Levin will address up to 600 guests at the United Nations in a ceremony organized by the Ukrainian and…
I’ve spent most of my adult life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the reigning deity is liberal politics, and in Miami Beach, where the locals worship sun-bronzed physical perfection. Not that there’s anything wrong with either one. But there came a point — amid an array of midlife disjunctions, including an empty…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis is joined by Forward editor Jane Eisner and Forward fellow Naomi Zeveloff to discuss Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad and his hopes for Palestinian statehood. Then, the group turns to discuss the Israel debate on US college campuses and how college presidents are handling the sometimes-toxic atmosphere. Finally,…
Yair Lapid, anchor of Israel’s most popular weekend news show, columnist in the best-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot, author, screenwriter and one-time actor, is the self-styled voice of what he calls the “42%.” According to his calculation, this is the proportion of the population that is Jewish, secular and Zionist. It’s a political constituency for which…
