AMSTERDAM (JTA) — The Jewish community of Deventer in the east of the Netherlands is protesting a Dutch-Turkish entrepreneur’s plan for transforming their former synagogue into a restaurant. Tom Fürstenberg, chairman of Deventer’s Beth Shoshanna Jewish community, made up of several dozen members, told the regional newspaper De Stentor that it would be “scandalous” if…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Those of us who love Yiddish are often naturally drawn to objects of a previous era. No surprise, then, that many of us have boxes of old stuff stashed away in the attic or closet, related either to our own past or to that of a relative…
This week, in response to the Trump administration’s declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared in a scathing speech that “Israel is a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Jews.” Abbas did not invent this characterization of Israel; it is a longstanding contention of anti-Zionists. Zionism’s…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press By Eddy Portnoy Stanford University Press, 280 pages $15.25 When the study of Jewish history began in the 19th century, it had two goals: To create an objective picture of the Jewish past and to…
All cultures have a tendency to make their building blocks into part of a collective myth, oversimplifying them in textbooks and in the collective consciousness of their members. We Jews are hardly immune from this impulse. Indeed, we have performed this very simplification upon a touchstone of our culture: the Hebrew language. Hebrew plays a…
An upcoming auction of historical items at Christie’s in New York includes a 1798 letter from leaders of the Jewish community of the Caribbean island of Curacao protesting the anti-Semitism of the French colonial ruler. The two-page manuscript, written by community leaders David Cohen Henriquez and Jacob de Castro, protested a statement from the French…
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — A Polish historian who said the country’s Nazi invasion was not so bad for Jews on Friday received a medal from the Polish Minister of National Education “for special merits for education.” Tomasz Panfil, who is responsible for education at the Institute of National Remembrance, earlier this month wrote an article in which…
An influential Chinese blogger wept as he met with Holocaust survivor and author Solomon Perel, Ynet News reported. Yan Jingsheng has millions of followers on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, and Perel is author of the book “Europa, Europa.” The two met when Perel gave a talk to a delegation of Chinese bloggers in Israel…
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