In a small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, no more than a room and a bit, Yitzhak Buxbaum worked, rested, taught and dined. He and his wife, Carole Forman, hosted friends and followers in that cluttered apartment, with manuscripts-in-progress scattered about and Hasidic paintings on the walls. Sitting there with him, as I did so many…
There are a few posts going around reminding folks that since Ruth Bader Ginsburg is Jewish, the proper thing to say about her passing is “May her memory be for a blessing.” That’s true, but I wanted to add a bit of perspective on what that means. Jewish tradition does not focus on the afterlife….
The way to mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg is to embody her multitude of qualities, and take them forward into a certain struggle Ginsburg, who died at 87 on Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, did not come by her icon status quickly or easily. It was built, year after year, decision after decision,…
NEW YORK (JTA) – Norman Lamm, the prolific author and Modern Orthodox rabbi who headed Yeshiva University for nearly three decades, died Sunday. He was 92. As president and chancellor of Y.U., Lamm helped rescue the institution from the financial brink in the late 1970s and rebuild it in the decades that followed into the…
Rolf Hochhuth, the controversial German dramatist whose play “The Deputy” sparked protests and ignited an ongoing reappraisal of Pope Pius XII’s World War II-era legacy, died May 13 at his home in Berlin. He was 89 years old. In the 1950s, Hochhuth began studying the history of the Third Reich, which had risen to power…
They were married for 64 years. Then they died of coronavirus, within hours of each other. When Gerald and Arline Polinsky, 89 and 86 respectively, died on the night of April 13, it was the conclusion to a quiet but enduring love story. They met in 1951, when Boston-born Arline Furman traveled to St. Louis…
The Flatbush Jewish Journal, a weekly Orthodox publication based in Brooklyn, published fifty pages of obituaries in its most recent issue. The obituaries painted a picture of a community devastated by coronavirus. Several pages were devoted to the Novominsker Rebbe and the Sasregener Rebbe, heads of two Hasidic dynasties who died of coronavirus in April….
Hal Willner might have been the most willfully strange person in show business. The music producer, who died on Monday at age 64 of complications of coronavirus, had a magic touch. He could get anyone to do anything: Tom Waits to sing an unrecognizable, railroad-rough version of “Heigh Ho” from Disney’s “Snow White”; R &…
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