(JTA) — When Jeff Wang was applying to U.S. colleges more than two years ago from his home near Shanghai, Brandeis University was a top choice. Like many Chinese students now at Brandeis, he had discovered the university on Chinese Internet forums that touted the school’s academic rankings and its high faculty-to-student ratio. Wang noted…
Who knew that we loved to listen to the air? Until the death of analogue music we never realized we craved the warmth of vinyl’s atmospheric cracklings, but in 2014 record sales spiked 49%. And so it is with printing. Once we no longer rely for our news on swathes of newsprint hurtling through factories…
On a Sunday morning in late November, around 250 people fill the dark brown wooden pews of the Vilna Shul in Boston. A synagogue built by Jewish immigrants from Lithuania in 1919 on Phillips Street in the central Beacon Hill neighborhood, it closed in 1985, and then reopened as a cultural center in the early…
1) Massachusetts has a Jewish population of roughly 278,000, accounting for 4.2% of the state population (which is twice the national average), and 4.1% of the total Jewish population in the United States. 2) Solomon Franco, a merchant who arrived from Holland in 1649, is Boston’s first recorded Jewish resident. However, he was not allowed…
Two Jewish candidates were defeated in the Democratic primary for Massachusetts governor. Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney general, on Tuesday defeated Steve Grossman, the state treasurer and Don Berwick, a former administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Coakley, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2010, garnered 42 percent of…
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz’s house is a bit of a mess. Most of the rooms in his Martha’s Vineyard home are cluttered with half-unpacked boxes filled with items from his Cambridge house, which he and his wife emptied recently and sold after he retired from his Harvard Law School professorship in June. Dershowitz himself wears a…
Steve Grossman, the former chair of AIPAC and one-time head of the Democratic National Committee, is one of two Democratic Jewish candidates for Massachusetts governor on the primary ballot. Grossman, Massachusetts State Treasurer, and Don Berwick, a one-time pediatrician and former Medicare chief, qualified for the primary ballot in voting by party delegates at the…
Ten years ago, shortly after midnight on May 17, 2004, a jubilant Arthur Lipkin and his longtime partner descended the stone steps of Cambridge City Hall clutching a marriage license application. It was a historic night of revelry and celebration, as Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to allow same-sex couples to legally…
