Alan Gross, who was imprisoned for five years in Cuba for his work connecting its Jewish community to the Internet, marked the one-year anniversary of his release pledging to advance warmer U.S.-Cuba ties. In a statement issued Wednesday, Gross thanked those who supported him while in prison and announced he will soon be a grandfather…
Grandma Rose, aka Texas Rose, was mean until the day she died. She was as stingy with love as she was with money, and saved her greatest affection for the San Antonio Spurs, hats with sparkly rhinestones, and anything that could be categorized as a good deal. Even into her 90s, she started each day…
Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Seemingly waiting for her thoughts to fuse, Ruth Fischer’s photo in our archive depicts her with notepad in hand at the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1946, in a…
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…
Polish MP Slawomir Kopycinski called for the shuttering of the Regulatory Commission for Jewish Communities, a Polish body that restores property owned by Holocaust victims to its legal heirs. Kopycinski called the commission ”the fourth partition of Poland” in a Thursday press conference, alluding to previous partitions of the country in the 1700s and again…
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister, was being remembered by the Jewish world for fighting anti-Semitism and as a friend of Israel. Mazowiecki, a former journalist, died Monday in Warsaw. He was 86. “We are deeply saddened by the loss of a great statesman and friend,” Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish…
A portrait of Abraham Cahan is the first thing that greets a visitor to the Forward in New York City. It attracted me from the moment that I, then a young newspaperman in my midthirties, first stopped by the paper’s editorial rooms. It was early in 1983. Published in Yiddish and known as the Forverts,…
On both occasions that the KGB arrested the Yiddish writer and poet Naftali Herts Kon, it burned his writings. When Kon escaped from the Soviet Union to Poland in 1959, he thought everything would be different — but it wasn’t. When the Polish Communists arrested Kon in 1960, they simply confiscated his writings and refused…
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