JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
A decorous, unjudgmental New York Times article appeared May 7 about the sexuality of the late American Jewish politician Ed Koch. Based on interviews with Koch friends and sympathizers, the article described how the onetime New York mayor publicly denied his own homosexuality, while admitting it to intimates, a fact that is long familiar to…
David Dinkins, New York City’s 106th mayor but its first Black one, died at the age of 93 on Monday. A lifelong Harlem Democrat who spent his career in government and politics, Dinkins became mayor in 1989, defeating three-term incumbent Ed Koch. To many, his name is associated with the 1991 Crown Heights riots, in…
The billionaire businessmen and political megadonors Charles and David Koch both invested in now-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s RatPac-Dune Entertainment in 2013, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The production company has produced recent hits like “Wonder Woman,” “Dunkirk,” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Bill Gates has also quietly invested in the company. Mnuchin, the…
Ed Koch, the crotchety Jewish mayor of New York City who died in 2013, harbored a decades-long dislike of Donald Trump. Now, he’s venting that dislike from beyond the grave. New writings from Koch’s archives on Trump emerged in a report in the New York Times Monday. “Donald Trump is one of the least likable…
Populism comes in many shades. A global current of simmering anger and resentment, manifested most alarmingly on Friday in the UK, continues to buoy race-baiting demagogues. “Weiner,” the new Anthony Weiner documentary, while stunning in its sensational front-row view of the former congressman and mayoral candidate’s implosion, provides a portrait of another brand of the…
I first met Mario Cuomo, the former New York State governor who died at 82 on Thursday, at Grossinger’s in the Catskills in 1982. He and Ed Koch were debaters before the New York State Broadcasters Association Annual Conference. Hearing of my Forward connection, Koch told me outright “tell your readers to rush to the…
That Neil Barsky selected Ed Koch as the subject of his first film was far from an accident. Barsky spent his formative years in New York during Koch’s mayoralty (1978-1989), both as a high school student and later as a journalist. The city was in the midst of desperate times. Crime was rampant and the…
The first day of the auction of the former New York Mayor Ed Koch’s possessions fetched a sum of $51,755 at Doyle New York auction house, far greater than the expected $20 – $30,000, the New York Daily News reported. Koch’s dining set, which included of six Frank Lloyd Wright-designed chairs, was expected to fetch…
