The prolific literary translator Joachim Neugroschel died on May 23 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 73. Neugroschel translated more than 200 books from Yiddish, French, German, Russia and Italian, including the work of Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti. His legal guardian and former partner, Aaron Mack Schloff, confirmed Neugroschel’s death. The son of the Yiddish Galician…
Within hours of President Obama’s May 19 policy speech on the Middle East, a panoply of Jewish organizations had e-blasted their initial reactions, putting the spectrum of political opinion in the Jewish organizational world on full display. The chart below offers a sampling of this range, from right to left. Chart by Andrew Tobin. Click…
One of America’s leading ultra-Orthodox groups has reaffirmed that its followers must consult a rabbi before going to law enforcement authorities with suspicions of sexual abuse committed by community members. The admonitions, from speakers at a conference sponsored by Agudath Israel of America, came even though a recent rabbinic edict permits reporting such crimes to…
The potency of Israel as a wedge issue for Republicans going into 2012 was on full display when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invited a small group of Democrats and Republicans to a first-ever joint meeting at Blair House one day before his May 24 speech to Congress. During his high-profile congressional speech, Democrats and…
It is the magic formula that could end the occupation while letting the majority of settlers stay put. But how would an Israeli-Palestinian land swap, the basis of President Obama’s Middle East vision, outlined on May 19, actually work? The main practical problem of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank is the fact that…
For seven years, the Rev. Patrick Debois has devoted his life to locating and marking the mass graves of Jews murdered by the Nazis. Now, the work of the Catholic priest is going online — thanks to a joint initiative between his Paris-based organization and Washington’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yahad — In Unum,…
What is the right thing to do — what is the good? And does doing it, if indeed we can know it, bring happiness? These questions are not exactly new. They are also not exactly bad. “Nemesis” raises them rather more starkly, and elegantly, than other books Philip Roth has written. “Nemesis” also adds little…
In “Nemesis,” Philip Roth has written a deeply Proustian narrative of remembrance and loss in which the invisible power of the past takes its vengeance upon a 5’4”, short-sighted, earnest and physically powerful young man of limited imagination but innocent and good intentions. Understanding the position of the Jew in the modern world, as Max…
Rabbi Arthur Schneier Presented With Legion of Honor Medal by François Delattre, France’s Ambassador to the United States “President [Nicolas] Sarkozy has a good eye. You are the youngest French ambassador appointed to the United States,” Rabbi Arthur Schneier said to François Delattre, who on May 12 presented France’s Officer of the French Legion medal…
In this week’s Forward Reporters’ Roundtable, news editor Larry Cohler-Esses and opinion editor Gal Beckerman sit down with host Josh Nathan-Kazis to discuss Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s May 24’s address before a joint session of Congress. How did Netanyahu’s speech compare to the one made by President Obama days earlier? What are the implications…
In “Nemesis,” much like elsewhere in that astonishing canvas that is Philip Roth’s work, community is something that no credible human being can live with and whose absence tears, scars without end. It seems not insignificant that the greatest of all living novelists to explore the inescapability of aloneness is born of a people that…
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