The Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago is holding a special meeting today to discuss the Chicago Jewish community’s response to the Iran deal. The Jewish Federation is the most important Jewish organization in Chicago and the meeting today will be attended by members of many Jewish organizations,…
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he supports the Iran nuclear deal. Asked about it at a press conference Tuesday, Emanuel, a Democrat who is President Obama’s former chief of staff, said, according to the Chicago Tribune: “The simplest way to say it is, if I was in Congress, I would support the president’s initiative. But…
Chicago’s Jewish federation has come out against the Iran deal. After a three-hour discussion by the board of directors, “a majority opinion emerged and was adopted: to call on Congress to oppose the JCPOA as originally submitted, and to ask legislators to work with the Administration to produce better solutions addressing Iran’s nuclear program,” the…
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,…
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