Writer/musician Michael Hearst loves a good artistic challenge, like whipping up recipes set to song or penning odes to the world’s weirdest animals. A founding member of the klezmer-ish band One Ring Zero, Hearst grew up Jewish in Virginia Beach and moved to New York, where he has put his musical training and deep love…
Never, since the time of Little Miss Muffet, have curds and whey attracted such attention. As Arabs ignite pro-democracy demonstrations across the Middle East through Facebook, Israelis, too, are turning to the networking site to bring about social change. Their end game: to cut the price of cottage cheese. And it seems they’ve succeeded. Almost…
In an effort to settle one of the longest-running disputes in the Middle East peace process, American, Israeli and Palestinian researchers are conducting what purports to be the first scientific study of incitement in Palestinian and Israeli textbooks. The study, funded by a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of State, was commissioned by the…
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rose to address the 4,000 delegates at the close of Shimon Peres’s Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem on June 23, he beamed like a film student accepting an Oscar. It seemed at first glance an unlikely pose; the actual guest of honor was Peres, Netanyahu’s longtime ideological rival. True,…
Staff writers Naomi Zeveloff and Nathan Guttman discuss the new political coalition between Latinos and Jews on Capitol Hill, and also how the proposed creation of a Latino congressional seat could imperil the career of a prominent Jewish congressman. Then opinion editor Gal Beckerman joins the conversation to discuss the life and legacy of Soviet…
For 24 years, James Besser has been watching Jewish politics from up close. As the unofficial dean of the Washington Jewish media corps, the veteran reporter of the New York Jewish Week, who retired June 22, has been uniquely positioned to observe how the world of Jewish politics has changed and how, in many senses,…
She was our spiritual leader. She made room for us at the table by creating a whole new one — a Seder table at which women’s voices were heard. She encouraged us to ask the Four Questions of Women and to recite women’s plagues, of which there were always more than 10. She honored our…
That Jill Abramson, the next executive editor of The New York Times, is Jewish does not distinguish her from many in the long line of top editors in whose footsteps she follows. Including her, four of the paper’s last six executive editors have been Jewish. Yet, as the country’s most influential newspaper faces the critical…
One of the possible consequences of New York Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter-gate affair is another decline in the number of Jewish representatives in Congress. The massive overrepresentation of Jews on Capitol Hill, long a source of pride for the community, has been shrinking in recent years and could drop in the coming election cycle from…
With more than $1 million in funding and with conferences in Israel, America, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and, soon, Moldova, Limmud FSU may have achieved the impossible: a way of making Jewishness attractive to young Russian-speaking Jews around the world. But in order to succeed, the 6-year-old organization has had to bend Limmud’s rules — some…
The mystery surrounding President Washington’s famous 1790 letter guaranteeing religious liberty in America continues. As the Forward revealed last week, Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., disappeared from public view almost a decade ago, after the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, where the letter had been displayed for half a century,…
