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Culture Jews Who Died Fighting in Red Army
On May 9, 1995 — 50 years after the end of World War II — I stood among a celebratory crowd in a provincial Russian town and glanced over to see a war veteran pointedly scoop a palmful of water out of a puddle. The veteran drank as if it were the finest water he…
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News Recalling The Navigator
My 84-year-old dad has gone around the corner to get a newspaper and hasn’t come back. Two hours he’s missing now, my mom is telling me over the phone, and she’s worried. Her voice comes in wheezing gulps, the Flatbush accent deepening as it does at times when she’s anxious. He’s wandering the flat grid…
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Fast Forward Penn State Rocked: Paterno, Spanier Fired
Students rioted in the streets of State College, Pa., Wednesday night after Penn State’s board fired revered football coach Joe Paterno, who has been caught up in a spiralling child sex scandal involving a former top assistant coach. The president of Penn State, Graham Spanier, who is Jewish and according to The Daily Collegian was…
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The Schmooze My Doctor Is Marrying Joe Biden’s Daughter
What is it about the daughters of Democratic politicians and Jewish men? Former Vice President Al Gore’s daughter Karenna married Andrew Schiff, who is descended from a long line of German Jews. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s only daughter, Chelsea, married Philadelphian Jew Marc Mezvinsky in a ceremony presided over by a rabbi. Now, Vice President…
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News Exploring Ties Between Halacha and Shariah
Abraham and Isaac — or, as some would have it, Ibrahim and Ishmael — took center stage when a panel including Muslim imams and some of America’s most prominent Modern Orthodox rabbis discussed their respective legal systems and foundational texts, and their implications for Jewish-Muslim relations today. The October 30 seminar “Ancient Texting” brought together…
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Culture Samuel Beckett’s Letters Reveal Roots of Resistance
Although Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett is known for his tragicomically inert characters, he himself was an anti-Nazi activist during World War II. Unlike the ever-absent Godot, the bedridden vagrant protagonist of his novel “Molloy” or the despairing characters in his play “Endgame” who lack legs and the ability to stand, Beckett — though painfully…
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News President Confuses Jews and Janitors, Or Does He?
It took a friend to bring to my attention President Obama?s recent and underreported slip of the tongue, made during an address to the Congressional Black Caucus on September 24, in which he confused the words ?janitor? and ?Jew.? Though mentioned on the Forward?s Shmooze blog, the media made scant mention of the incident for…
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News Jews and Latinos Seek Common Ground
It was billed as a broad coming together of two of Los Angeles’s most important ethnic communities. But percolating underneath the closed-door sessions and the concluding public declarations of common cause on such issues as immigration, racism and anti-Semitism at a recent “summit” between local Jewish and Latino groups was a more immediate issue: the…
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News Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s selection as JTS commencement speaker roils graduating class
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Opinion How Israel became a country where teenagers murder each other in cold blood
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Sports NBA coach Steve Kerr: ‘Israel sought revenge for Oct. 7 and now 72,000 Palestinians have been killed’
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Film & TV A new documentary challenges stereotypes about Orthodox Jewish women — and their wigs
In Case You Missed It
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News Most Jewish voters rate Mamdani poorly, new poll finds
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Fast Forward After a Maryland teacher’s death, her 200-piece Judaica collection finds new life in a Jewish museum
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Fast Forward British Green Party candidate tweeted about killing Zionists from Anne Frank parody account
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Yiddish World New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America