My grandmother Anna Soltzberg (née Seiger) occasionally called her grandchildren foyl (lazy). She lived at our house for a while. I called her Bub — short for bubbe. I wasn’t going to call her Bubbe. Too effeminate. Bub was not into baseball; she was into the card game casino, the television show “Queen for a…
With nine-term Jewish congresswoman Jane Harman stepping down Congress is loosing a key pro-Israel voice and one of its leading Democratic centrists. Harman’s close ties with the pro-Israel lobby made her a subject of a 2006 FBI wiretap in which she was allegedly asked by an Israeli agent to intervene on behalf of two former…
In this week Forward Reporters’ Roundtable, host Josh Nathan-Kazis speaks with Forward contributor Eric Trager about the implications of the current uprising in Cairo. Trager was, until recently, doing research in the Egyptian capital. Josh also speaks with Sisterhood blog contributor Sarah Seltzer about new legislative threats to abortion rights and access. At the end…
The call for the release of Israeli convicted spy Jonathan Pollard is gaining momentum: Now adding his name to the list of supporters is Bernard Nussbaum, who served as the White House legal counsel for President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1994. Nussbaum — along with Philip Heymann, who was deputy Attorney General at the…
If the French call this kind of pastry Viennoiserie, and it hails from Vienna, why do Americans call it Danish? In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a bakers’ strike in Copenhagen, and the strikers were replaced with Viennese workers, who baked their own national recipes. When the strike was over, the customers had developed a…
Chava Rosenfarb, who died on January 30 at the age of 87 in Lethbridge, Alberta, was a Yiddish prose writer and poet who made her mark as a postwar Yiddish writer in Canada. One of the few female novelists in Yiddish, Rosenfarb was a Holocaust survivor whose landmark Holocaust trilogy — published in 1972 and…
After once uniting to support regime change in Iraq through an American military invasion, neoconservatives are now divided as they face the prospect of a regime change in Egypt driven by popular internal forces out of America’s control. As Washington’s foremost champions of pushing to overturn Middle East dictatorships, monarchies and autocracies, these advocates, including…
Several recent setbacks for J Street are refocusing attention on the dovish Israel lobby’s ongoing struggle to gain acceptance both in Washington and within the broader Jewish community. J Street’s opposition to an American veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity cost it the support of a key member of…
On “Angry Friday” — January 28 — just as the demonstrations that rocked Egypt turned violent, I tried to make my way home. After navigating side streets to avoid the suffocating clouds of tear gas that riot police shot into the sky with reckless abandon, I arrived at a key bridge over the Nile, only…
The once unthinkable is happening. As Americans ponder a post-Mubarak Egypt, they are asking the most natural question: What does this mean for us strategically? The Egyptian demonstrators are keenly aware of American concerns. They know that the United States is the most influential power player in the region, and that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak…
A powerful African drumbeat pounded through the small room, as a singer with a Bob Marley-like voice clicked two small wooden sticks to the rhythm of his words. “When I walk, I walk with love,” he crooned in a mesmerizing Jamaican accent. Every one of the 25 African-American men, women and children in the room…
דאָס בוך איז גרונטיק געפֿאָרשט, לעבעדיק אָנגעשריבן — אָבער אידעאָלאָגיש באַפֿאַרבט
