This week, the Israeli government announced its plan to ban the entry of key activists from 20 groups who advocate Boycott Divestment and Sanctions of Israel. The move is neither surprising nor new. Israel has for years been barring people from entering the country over their politics – even Jews. In 2010, it denied Noam…
Every country in the world is allowed to decide who gets to visit. So the government of Israel was within its rights when it announced over the weekend that it would deny entry to senior leaders and high profile activists from 20 organizations that support the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. Personally,…
NEW YORK (JTA) — In 2012, Rabbi Jason Herman wrote a letter to Israel’s Chief Rabbinate certifying that a friend of his who wished to get married was Jewish and single. The letter was declared invalid. But several months later Herman, spiritual leader of the Orthodox West Side Jewish Center in Manhattan, obtained a license…
— New York state has released a blacklist of 13 foreign companies that support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement against Israel. The list on stationary from the Office of General Services is dated Dec. 2. It was first reported by the New York Post. Among the companies on the list are Danske…
I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir By Lee Grant Blue Rider Press, 480 pages, $28.95 Oscar-winning American Jewish actress Lee Grant is one of the rare performers (along with Zero Mostel) to have eventually triumphed over the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. She did so through a combination of fierce determination, zesty…
Fifty-five years ago today, union activist and thespian Philip Loeb checked himself into the Taft Hotel in Midtown Manhattan under a false name and took a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Targeted by the insidious blacklist, Loeb could no longer find work in his beloved acting profession and had reached rock bottom. Tonight, a panel…
Before Beaver Cleaver introduced television watchers to his suburban boyhood, before Lucy and Desi’s domestic misadventures became ingrained in the consciousness of the American household, and before the world had even heard of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Gertrude Berg was the queen of the American sitcom. As the head writer, producer and leading actress of…
On July 6, the New York-born screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas celebrated her 110th birthday in La Mesa, California. Maas was born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants named Zagorsky — anglicized to Sagor at Ellis Island — who placed a solid emphasis on culture, despite their humble social status. In addition to subsidizing the…
100% of profits support our journalism
