The Jewish blogosphere was alive with commentary after Rabbi Brant Rosen, the co-chair of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rabbinical Council, on July 5 the foundation of Tzedek Chicago. This new congregation takes a radical approach to Judaism: it welcomes Jews and non-Jews, rejects any form of nationalism, and openly declares that the creation of a…
A suburban Chicago woman who stole $21,000 from a Hadassah chapter she served as treasurer was sentenced to two years of probation. Rozann Morowitz, 68, of Wheeling, Illinois, paid back the money she took from the Buffalo Grove Hadassah chapter when she was treasurer from 2011 to 2013. She paid $16,000 in restitution when she…
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune By Zachary Leader Knopf, 832 pages, $40 ‘Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow asked on his deathbed. By “man,” of course, he meant mensch. Zachary Leader, Bellow’s new biographer, answers Bellow’s dying question: “Both.” Bellow was a jerk: Famously prickly and…
The Making of Zombie Wars By Aleksandar Hemon Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $26 Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel “The Making of Zombie Wars” is preceded by two epigraphs. The first, attributed to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, reads, “The mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body endures.” The second…
1) 297,885 Jews live in Illinois. 2) The first recorded Jewish resident in Illinois was John Hays who lived in Cahokia, near the Missouri border. He was a farmer, trader, and soldier, and served as St. Clair County’s postmaster until 1798, when he was appointed sheriff. 3) Music entrepreneur Sol Bloom developed the Midway Plaisance,…
Compulsion By Meyer Levin Fig Tree Books, 480 pages, $15.95 Why, in 2015, should we be interested in a novel that was written 60 years ago? Moreover, why are we interested in a crime that was committed 90 years ago? When I was growing up in New York in the 1950s, there was no one…
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel strongly defended the firing of a white police officer who was photographed with a colleague holding rifles and posing over a black man wearing antlers like an animal killed on a hunt, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. “Good riddance,” Emanuel said. “Let me be clear: That photo does not represent the values…
Josh Ozersky, an award-winning Jewish food writer, drowned in a Chicago hotel room shower after suffering a seizure, authorities reportedly said Wednesday. The James Beard Award winner drowned May 4 in his room at the Conrad Hotel, the Cook County medical examiner’s office told the Chicago Sun-Times. An autopsy revealed the cause of death and…
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