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Cal Irvine Students Met with Hamas Leader
Students from the University of California, Irvine met with a Hamas leader during a student trip to Israel. The Institute for Jewish and Community Research said it learned recently that the university’s branch of the Olive Tree Initiative, an Israeli-Palestinian peace organization, arranged for a meeting between the Irvine students and a Hamas leader in…
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Learning Her Mother’s Legacy
In September 1909, Clara Lemlich, a young woman from Ukraine, stood up in front of a crowded auditorium in New York City’s Cooper Union. After listening to lengthy speeches by union leaders who urged caution, Lemlich said that the poor pay and unsafe working conditions could go on no longer, and she called for a…
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HRW Founder Charts Another Way To Probe Human Rights
When Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, publicly split last year from the groundbreaking organization he birthed in the late 1970s, most people assumed this was the last they would hear from the 88-year-old publisher-turned-activist. But Bernstein was not finished. It appears that The New York Times op-ed in which he charged HRW with…
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One Person’s Quest To Find and Restore The Graves of the Triangle Fire’s Victims
Scattered among 16 cemeteries around New York they came to rest, the 146 people whose lives were violently cut short 100 years ago in one of the nation’s worst industrial disasters — the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. A few years ago, I set out to see if I could learn who these people were in…
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New Initiative Will Integrate Hebrew School With Other Aspects of Jewish Life
Synagogue religious education, an often alienating rite of passage for generations of Jews, is in for a major transformation under an experimental program set to launch next year. The experiment, sponsored by the Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning, will see children whose parents sign them up for synagogue Hebrew schools also exposed to Jewish…
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Triangle Fire Victims’ Families Gather To Affirm Ongoing Legacy
It was a family reunion of sorts — just 100 years after the fact. As soon as the march and speeches were over, and the names of all 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire had been read aloud, family members of those who died and those who survived the March 25, 1911, blaze…
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Washington Turns Toward Iran as Revolutions Spread in the Middle East
Amid the revolutionary turmoil sweeping the Arab world, there is renewed interest in Washington in supporting the movement for human rights and democracy in Iran. The new atmosphere reflects a noticeable shift in the policy discussion in Washington. The Obama administration has, at times, been hesitant to embrace Iran’s opposition movement, wary of being seen…
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Cuba’s Remnant Rediscovers Religion
The hubbub surrounding Cuba’s small Jewish community these days does not faze Yakob Berezniak Hernandez. Sitting behind a desk crowded with a typewriter, several cans of Lieber’s tomato paste and piles of loose foreign change, Hernandez, of Havana’s Adath Israel synagogue, waved away inquiries about Alan Gross, the 61-year-old American Jewish contractor sentenced to 15…
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Coveted by Jewish Bidders, D.C. Bookstore Finds New Owners
At Tifereth Israel Congregation, on the northernmost tip of northwest Washington, just before the District of Columbia brushes against Maryland, there is a new book group. Named for Carla Cohen, the Sabbath-afternoon group will be reading this longtime congregant’s favorite books in her honor. It might seem unremarkable — a beloved congregant, a book lover,…
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If You Will It, They Will Come Play Ball
PITCHING IN THE PROMISED LAND Aaron Pribble University of Nebraska Press 272 pgs $24.95 When I learned that a professional baseball league would be starting up in Israel in 2007, I was excited that my two great loves, Israel and baseball, would be together at last, like chocolate and peanut butter. America?s pastime had taken…
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The Rich and the Bloody
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 By Adrienne Rich W.W. Norton & Company, 24.95 How does poetry serve, since, as W.H. Auden told us long ago, it ?makes nothing happen?? That is the question behind Adrienne Rich?s most recent book, which comes as a summary of all she has learned in the course of…
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