On Saturday, February 26, my mother-in-law, Judith Socolov, died peacefully in her sleep at age 89. Her death was covered extensively by The Associated Press and The New York Times, and reporters openly discussed her “infamous” past as part of a Cold War drama that had long been forgotten. As a 28-year-old State Department employee…
Amid a raging national debate over the federal budget, Jewish organizations are rallying to save projects that are dear to the community from the chopping block. But this year, battling budget cuts seems especially difficult, given the hostility to federal spending among congressional Republicans and a lack of clarity as to the bottom lines of…
At Wisconsin’s Capitol building, in Madison, rabbis and other members of the state’s Jewish community have been a visible presence as protests have swelled in support of state and local public worker unions. But the community’s biggest and most politically influential bodies — its two federations and affiliated community relations councils — have been conspicuously…
By the time the union was done with J.P. Stevens and Co., the boycott of the giant textile manufacturer had so penetrated the culture that the wives of Stevens executives, heading off to cocktail parties, would warn their husbands not to tell anyone where they worked. It’s an anecdote that Bruce Raynor, the latest —…
Three years after a Lower East Side match that seemed made in heaven, Manhattan’s historic but struggling Sixth Street Community Synagogue and popular Chabad rabbi Simon Jacobson have divorced amid acrimony to rival that of a bad marriage from an Isaac Bashevis Singer tale. Jacobson, once seen by members of the synagogue as a potential…
Marilyn Henry was the quintessential old-school girl reporter — more Hildy Johnson in “His Girl Friday” than Brenda Starr. Her laser-sharp brain could cut through the most complex philosophical, financial, legal, religious and arcane data to get to the heart of a story. Her two masterworks were “Twice Stolen,” an almost-finished book project, aborted by…
The death of Brazilian fabulist Moacyr Scliar, at the age of 73, on February 27, in his native Porto Alegre, represents the loss of Latin America’s most popular Jewish writer of his generation, and the most influential. Scliar engaged a large audience, at home and abroad, reflecting on crucial issues that define modernity: the place…
Last winter, while tucking into blintzes and borscht at our favorite greasy spoon in Manhattan’s East Village, my husband and I struck up a conversation with an older man sitting down the counter from us. He was a classic Woody Allen-era New Yorker: oversized glasses, rumpled shirt and a thick Brooklyn accent — sociable enough,…
In this Purim episode of the Yiddish Forward’s online cooking show, “Eat in Good Health,” Rukhl “Ray” Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz prepare a Purim feast.
It’s a beautiful setting for such a poignant memorial: A rail line cuts through the grassy edge of the boulevard, overlooking the gentle waves of the Rio de la Plata, the wide, sealike river on Montevideo’s edge. Nearby, a high granite wall buffers a stone path leading to a chaotic plaza, the surroundings broken in…
A debate about Israel in Greenwich Village, arguably the liberal heartland of the country, can really only end one way: with people screaming at each other. And so it was March 3, at an evening event billed as a “debate” between Brooklyn Congressman Anthony Weiner and former Congressman Brian Baird of Washington State at the…
דאָס בוך איז גרונטיק געפֿאָרשט, לעבעדיק אָנגעשריבן — אָבער אידעאָלאָגיש באַפֿאַרבט
