This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. More than thirty years ago, at the beginning of the 1980s, Forverts assistant editor David Matis, who also happened to be a friend of my father’s, invited…
The father of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin nearly started crying when asked a question about his son, The New York Times reported Sunday. Robert Mnuchin, an art dealer, was in the news because he had arranged a $91.1 million auction purchase of a 3-foot-tall stainless steel rabbit sculpture by artist Jeff Koons – making it…
One half of the Christian couple who dressed and acted like Orthodox Jews and tried to convert their neighbors wrote a Facebook post this week defending their actions and lambasting the “fake stories” that have brought “shame to Judaism.” Rivkah Joy Weber, who went by the name Rivkah Costello while living in the heavily-Jewish Chicago…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The mother of 4-year-old terror victim Adele Biton gave birth to a baby girl on the birthday of her late daughter. Adele was severely injured in a Palestinian rock attack in the West Bank in 2013 and died two years later after never regaining consciousness. “It’s not a matter of filling a…
(JTA) — Volunteers in Belarus reburied the remains of more than 1,000 Holocaust victims whose bodies recently were discovered during construction work in the city of Brest. The burial Tuesday was conducted by volunteers from the ZAKA Jewish search and rescue organization and overseen by a local Chabad rabbi, the news website Jewish.ru reported. The…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It is part of a series on Forverts memories written by and about present and past Forverts writers and editors. By the time I began working at the Forverts as an associate editor under Boris Sandler, I had missed out on the paper’s venerable traditions of Yiddish…
NEW YORK (JTA) — A man from New Jersey who allegedly wanted to shoot pro-Israel rallygoers and bomb Trump Tower was arrested for trying to provide support to Hamas. Jonathan Xie, 20, of Basking Ridge, was arrested Wednesday, according to WABC-TV. He allegedly made various threats on Instagram, including that he wanted to “shoot everybody” at a…
The great Jewish debates of the 1950s and 1960s revolved around whether the Bible was or was not divine. It wasn’t a new conversation for Jews, but it took on new meaning in the wake of the Holocaust. We weren’t just arguing over whether God wrote the Bible, but over whether God was in Auschwitz,…
In April, a court in Zurich ordered a huge cache of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts transferred from Switzerland to the National Library of Israel. Now, the personal papers of Kafka’s confidant, Max Brod, who safeguarded those powerful texts, are headed there too. In a May 21 ceremony at the Israeli ambassador to Germany’s residence in Berlin,…
It’s on Wednesday May 22, 2019 (or on 18 Iyar every year) that we, as a Jewish people, reach peak beard. In the springtime, we committed Jews find ourselves asking some strange questions: “Does an orange belong on a Seder plate?“ “How fluffy can my potato flour cakes get before they look trayf?” And, “Should…
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