Late last night, a 4-year-old girl named Ofek and her mother, Nancy, were taken off a plane at Ben-Gurion airport just as it was getting ready to take off for the Philippines. The two were not tourists planning a vacation to the Far East, but rather a family set to be deported from Israel. An…
Replete with testimonies from witnesses with digitally altered appearances and electronically disguised voices, it’s a cross between a true crime show and Scared Straight. No, it’s not the latest reality TV show out of Hollywood. It’s a video called “The Price is Too High” made by the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to warn young…
It’s hard to believe that a cookbook published in 1936 would have much relevance to today’s cooks, other than as a culinary artifact. But Dr. Erna Meyer’s “How to Cook in Palestine” — widely regarded as the first “Israeli cookbook” — offers lessons and recipes that are just as valuable to cooks in 2011 as…
When the anti-immigration laws of the early 1920s effectively sealed the gates of the United States to would-be immigrants, the Jews of Eastern Europe who had arrived en masse between 1880 and 1920 could no longer hope to see their loved ones join them in America. Instead, those who could afford to traveled abroad, visiting…
This fall, eight guest editors are helping to shape the Forward Forum by commissioning opinion pieces. This week, it’s Morris J. Vogel, the president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum since June 2008. He graduated from Brandeis University, received a doctorate in American social and urban history from the University of Chicago, and served…
American Jews instinctively understand their deep stake in the national conversation about immigration. While it would be hard to point to any policy consensus, it is clear that many Jews are troubled — even offended — by the anti-immigrant hysteria growing in the blogosphere and by the demagogic exploitation of the issue in the political…
The U.S. government forced Rabbi Gail Diamond to make aliyah. She and her family have a good life in Israel — she teaches at a yeshiva in Jerusalem and her children are happy in school. But she didn’t move to Israel entirely by choice. She had to leave the U.S., and her Massachusetts congregation, when…
University Settlement, the first settlement house in this country, will soon be celebrating its 125th anniversary. Founded in 1886 to serve primarily Jewish immigrants to New York City from Eastern Europe, the Settlement has remained true to its original mission while adapting to the changing Lower East Side. The connection of past and present has…
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