A brand new American import has arrived in Israel, but it isn’t the usual fast-food chain or a television sitcom. Rather, it’s that staple of U.S. Jewish life, the community federation. For the first time, a group of philanthropists in the leafy city of Ramat HaSharon near Tel Aviv have created an Israeli charity —…
In the video, there was screaming, cursing and shooting that left one prisoner dead. But when, in early April, Israelis were given a fly-on-the-wall view of one of the most violent nights in the history of their prison service, other media outlets met it with a collective shrug. Those involved in monitoring Israel’s treatment of…
For the third year in a row, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has honored the Forward with an award for excellence in reporting. The Forward also won its second consecutive award from the chapter for excellence in opinion writing. The judges said that two strongly worded editorials favoring construction…
Congress’s power of the purse is emerging as a key factor in Washington’s effort to influence events in a rapidly changing Middle East. First and foremost, Congress is reacting quickly to the Palestinian unity government recently announced by the moderate Fatah faction controlling the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas running Gaza. While the Obama…
When the phone rings and the person on the other end says she’s from a reality TV production company and would like to know if you’d be interested in auditioning to host a new parenting show, you tend to compartmentalize. Or at least I did. The call came last summer, and I laughed about it…
Ending a lengthy and unsuccessful drive for Israeli–Arab peace, George Mitchell is stepping down as the Obama administration’s special envoy for the Middle East. The White announced the former Maine senator’s resignation on Friday, pointing to “personal reasons” for his decision to end his role as negotiator. “As he returns to his family, George leaves…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s forthcoming speech before the U.S. Congress, the growing spotlight on the Ratner real estate family in light of a recent indictment of a New York state senator, and a Brighton Beach, Brooklyn gathering of Jewish veterans who served in the Soviet armed forces during World War II are the topics of…
Maybe it’s a sgule — a remedy prescription, for long life — to become a Yiddish writer. Itche Goldberg and Mordkhe Tsanin both died at the ripe old age of 102 a few years ago; poet Avrom Sutskever died in 2010 at 96. Now the New York Yiddish world has lost another wonderful poet, Jeremiah…
Shtume Shprakh (Mute Language) (originally in sonnet form) I looked around — and saw that half of my years are fading on the dirt road; that over my life, there closes, from my burial shroud, the first pale fold. So I doubled up like a swallow, that no longer finds her nest under the roof….
Perhaps the greatest American poet ever to have lived, Walt Whitman was not always regarded as such. Thanks, in part, to the emergence of modernist forms in poetry toward the end of the 19th century, Whitman’s work did not attract critical attention until after his death in 1892. But for Jewish immigrant poets living in…
Yankev Glatshteyn (Jacob Glatstein) was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1896 to a religious family. In 1914, he immigrated to the United States under the pretense of enrolling in law school but almost immediately dropped out and became involved with the burgeoning Yiddish poetry scene in New York City’s Lower East Side, where he would…
