Twenty years after the violent riots that raged through the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, the state of the black-Jewish relationship — a source of much anguish in the riot’s wake — has almost disappeared from the Jewish communal agenda. It is still debatable whether a local conflict that pitted Caribbean blacks against Hasidim of…
The father-in-law of Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto has accused the prominent Sephardic kabbalist of money laundering, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In documents filed in a Jerusalem court, Shlomo Ben Hamo, Argentina’s chief rabbi, alleged that his daughter and her husband, Pinto, had pressured him into serving as guarantor on the…
The marchers come up President from the corner of Utica Avenue — “the accident site,” as it has come to be known — where Gavin Cato was killed by the car from Rabbi Schneerson’s motorcade. They have just been listening to Al Sharpton and Sonny Carson — the Al Sharpton “of Tawana Brawley fame,” the…
When I was a kid, starting from about the age of 7, I imagined that I would move to Israel. Obviously, I didn’t fully understand what “aliyah” really meant; I was just obsessed with the idea of the Jewish state. I plotted and planned, wrote short stories about an alter ego named Tamar who lived…
100 Years Ago in The Forward Sarah Cohen, 18, was walking home from work on Manhattan’s Lower East Side when a thief accosted her, snatching her purse. The thief wasn’t fast enough, and Ms. Cohen managed to grab him. But along came another thief, apparently a friend of the first one, and grabbed the purse…
People from my grandfather’s hometown in Lithuania were known to be proud of their roots. It was said that if you asked a traveling Keidan Jew where he was from, he would puff up, thump his chest and say, “Me? I’m a Keidaner!” — so forcefully that outsiders gave them the Yiddish nickname “gribl in…
Vulgar. Distasteful. Primitive. Ugly. These are just a few of the adjectives Russian speakers spat out in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn on August 12, the day after the premiere of Lifetime’s new reality show, “Russian Dolls.” But for all their feelings about the negative light in which the show cast them, some were…
Twenty years after the Crown Heights Riots, community leaders and activists in the diverse Brooklyn neighborhood are quick to emphasize that community relations are significantly better than in 1991, when three days of riots shook the neighborhood. But while hostilities and distrust between the Lubavitch and black communities may have dissipated or shifted, residents of…
As campus protests have continued against Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, and sometimes, against Israel itself, Jewish groups have been at odds over how to distinguish legitimate debate about Israel from anti-Semitism, and beyond that, at what point such protests may arguably constitute a violation of Jewish students’ civil rights. That debate, it’s now clear,…
On August 1, Taglit-Birthright Israel, the group that offers young Jews free 10-day tours to Israel, announced a new trip for a particular subset of Jews: professional journalists. More specifically, journalists who are alumni of Birthright. Since Birthright is in the business of fostering Diaspora Jews’ love for Israel (full disclosure: I went on such…
On the morning of July 22, 1966, The New York Times pushed aside its coverage of the Vietnam War and the Gemini 10 space flight mission to devote its lead story to a riot that had struck the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York the previous night. Next to the article appeared a photo of…
