A few months ago, one of my acquaintances asked me why, in traditional Jewish communities, women tend to have secular names and men tend to have Hebrew names. This person is deeply knowledgeable about the Jewish culture and languages spoken by Jews, and she assumed it had something to do with the way that women…
(JTA) — President Donald Trump proclaimed May Jewish Heritage Month. In his statement issued by the White House on Monday, Trump said that “Jewish Americans have helped guide the moral character of our Nation.” President George W. Bush first proclaimed May Jewish Heritage Month in 2006, and it has been proclaimed annually by the sitting president ever since….
Dr. Howard M. Sachar, Professor Emeritus of History and International Affairs at George Washington University and author of numerous works of Jewish, Middle-Eastern and European history passed away on April 18, 2018, at the age of 90 at his home in Kensington, Maryland. He was born to Dr. Abram L. Sachar and his wife, Thelma…
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…
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