The first thing I learned about Ed Koch is how unusually accessible he was. It was September, 1977, and I was a new, eager student at the Columbia School of Journalism, passionate about city news and interested in learning photography. The school published a weekly newspaper at the time, and I wanted to be the…
Edward Irving Koch, New York City’s long-serving, charismatic, controversial 105th mayor and arguably the most visible American Jewish official of his day, passed away this morning at age 88 from congestive heart failure. His three epitaphs, chosen several years before his death, expressed the centrality of Judaism to his identity. The first quotes the murdered…
The body of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be exhumed on Tuesday, eight years after his death, in an investigation to establish if he was murdered, a Palestinian official said on Saturday. A French court opened a murder inquiry in August into Arafat’s death in Paris after a Swiss institute said it had discovered…
I’m at that age when friends are becoming grandparents, and I hear a frequent refrain from them: Besides adoring their grandchildren, they express joyful wonderment at seeing their children become parents. I’m not ready for grandchildren yet. But I’m going through a similar experience at the other end of life, watching one of my daughters…
Russia will join an international investigation to determine whether the first Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, was murdered, the current Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said on Sunday. French and Swiss experts are due to exhume Arafat’s body in Ramallah later this month in an attempt to discover how he died after an Al Jazeera documentary in…
Former U.S. Democratic Senator George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, is “no longer responsive” and is surrounded by family and friends at a hospice center in South Dakota, his family said on Wednesday. McGovern, 90, was admitted to hospice in Sioux Falls “with a combination of medical conditions, due…
Earlier this summer, after we finished sitting shiva for my grandmother, I sifted through her top drawer. This was the drawer she herself had frequently rummaged through when I would visit her apartment, either to attempt to press cab fare into my hand, or to show me a pin or scarf that would be mine…
Israelis are nothing if not practical. So maybe it’s no surprise that an Israeli startup’s behind a new app that sends private messages to one’s dearly beloved after death — or that the Facebook app’s creators are offering a chance at worldwide fame to the (un)lucky participant who dies first. According to social media digest…
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