Some may view it as a double life: By night, she works in the most stereotypical of Orthodox women’s professions; by day, she’s a clown. After dark, Freda Kaplan, a rebbetzin and wife of Dov Kaplan, chief rabbi of Israel’s Caesarea, heads to a local ritual bath, where she is the mikveh lady, supervising women…
Two years ago, I fell head over heels for a matzo fritter. My husband and I were celebrating our first anniversary in Rome, and through a series of lucky coincidences we landed an invitation to an event hosted by Giovanni Terracina, owner of Le Bon Ton Catering. An upscale kosher catering company in Rome, Le…
Marla Gilson is a well-known face in Jewish advocacy circles. A long time head of Hadassah’s Washington office and an alumna of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the federation system, Gilson was recruited last June to head the Association of Jewish Aging Services (AJAS), an umbrella organization for 110 Jewish nursing homes and…
NEWS ITEM: New York City’s Queensboro Bridge has been renamed the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, in honor of the former mayor. The renaming was accomplished despite fierce opposition from some politicians. His enemies’ ire has risen a notch, They’re angered the bridge has been named for Ed Koch. “So how am I doin’?” he answers,…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis speaks with staff writer Gal Beckerman about a new human rights organization that is being launched by Robert Bernstein, the Human Rights Watch founder who split with that organization last year — thanks, in part, to what he sees as the group’s disproportionate scrutiny of open societies like…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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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