Wyman Brent may be about the most unlikely person you could find to establish a new Jewish library in the Baltic nation of Lithuania. Brent is neither a scholar nor an intellectual. He doesn’t speak Lithuanian and isn’t even Jewish. He is a wiry, soft-spoken, long-haired atheist from California; the type of man who signs…
Iran is less than a year away from being unstoppable in its goal of producing a nuclear weapon, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an interview with CNN released on Saturday. In an advance transcript of an interview to air on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” program on Sunday, Barak said Israel was focused on…
Crossing the Ras Ajdir border into Libya from Tunisia on October 24 and 25 required two attempts and three hours, and culminated with an instructive initiation into a post-revolution reality. The Libyan side felt like a scene from “Lord of the Flies”: gun-toting, barely uniformed teenagers attempting to enforce a semblance of authority; trucks roaming…
As Mark Whitaker was about to graduate Harvard, diploma and a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford in hand, his father gave him some memorable advice: ?Beware of what you ask for, because you might just get it.? The context here is important, as Whitaker relates in his fascinating new book, ?My Long Trip Home? (Simon &…
You know how easily it happens (or happened, back in the day when people read actual books): You’d use your grandmother’s favorite chicken soup recipe or the only negative of the twins’ birth from the 1950s as a bookmark, then you’d get busy with the twins or the chicken soup, and you’d put down the…
WOMEN ‘ROAR’ AND HONOR ‘LIONS’ AT UJA-FEDERATION OF NEW YORK LION OF JUDAH LUNCHEON Sheila Birnbaum, head of Skadden Arps’ Mass Torts and Insurance Litigation Group, received the Karen Klitzman Award at this year’s UJA Federation of New York’s Lion of Judah luncheon at The Pierre on November 2. (The award is named for a…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis is joined by Forward editor Jane Eisner, Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman and Forward fellow Naomi Zeveloff to discuss the fallout from the Palestinian’s statehood bid, which Ehud Barak once described as a potential “diplomatic tsunami.” Then, the group turns to the new funding models that have been proposed…
Touro College, a New York-based Jewish university, came under pointed questioning by curriculum experts after the Forward revealed that it granted academic credits for an online course put together by a pro-Israel advocacy group. Touro offered students credit for taking Israel Inside/Out, an online class cobbled together with materials like interviews with pro-Israel activists and…
Singer Basya Schechter, who for many years has led the band Pharaoh?s Daughter and who just released ?Songs of Wonder? (Tzadik), a collection of Yiddish songs based on the poetry of Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, is having a moment. And for good reason. Schechter makes music that is both appealing and intriguing. As an…
Israelis warned of a “diplomatic tsunami,” Palestinians promised a game changer that would reshape Middle East peacemaking, and the White House and Congress geared up for an all-out battle inside and beyond the United Nations. But on November 11, the Palestinians’ initiative to gain statehood recognition from the U.N. Security Council ended finally not with…
It was Independence Day on the West Bank, an annual commemoration of the fruitless Declaration of Independence proclaimed by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Algiers on November 15, 1988. Even though she got a day off from her job, Riham Rabiya wasn’t celebrating. “We’re celebrating Independence Day, but there’s no independence,” the 52-year-old secretary complained….
