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Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree The recent revelation that iTunes has created an app that seems to substitute for confession underscores the power of technology to redefine the very notion of ritual practice. So, too, has “Tweet Your Prayers,” in which electronic kvitlakh, or personal petitions, can be sent to the kotel, the Western…
As the year comes to a close, the New York Times Magazine published “The Lives They Lived,” an annual feature celebrating the lives of people who died over the last year. The collage is a mix of people known and unknown. This assortment of stories is more gender-balanced than the regular obituary section of the…
Yesterday I was watching Nightly News with Brian Williams and was surprised to see that Sparky Anderson got a five-minute tribute but Jerry Bock, the beloved composer of “Fiddler on the Roof,” didn’t get a mention. I have a personal stake in this, as I write musicals and often worry about posterity. Mr. Bock leaves…
Calling anyone the most interesting Jew in New York is hyperbolic, we know, but Roy Pinney was pretty close. In fact, forget most interesting Jew — most interesting person is more like it. Pinney, who passed away on August 9 at the age of 98, was a photographer, war correspondent and devoted herpetologist. The son…
Poet, singer-songwriter, revolutionary, publisher, street vendor, historian, mentor, sage, wise man and wise guy, forward-thinking artist, activist, intellectual, pacifist, anarchist, teacher, dreamer and dear friend Tuli Kupferberg has gone on to wherever one goes. Born Norman (or in Hebrew, Naphtali, hence his nickname), on September 28, 1923, Tuli passed away on Monday at New York…
J.D. Salinger, a grandson of a rabbi and an author whose fiction has held the deep affection of generations of readers, died January 27 at age 91. So extreme was the reclusion of the author, who wrote such books as “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Franny and Zooey,” that there will be no funeral…
For Jewish women of a certain age, Patrick Swayze will always occupy a special corner of the heart. Tough and tender, he embodied for some of us — ok for me, at least — a certain fantasy. Let’s call it the Jewish girl’s yearning for the blue-eyed Christian boy — akin to the Jewish boy’s…
Iris Ovshinsky, co-founder of an influential alternative-energy company, drowned August 16 while swimming in a pond near her home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. She was 79. Ovshinsky was serving as vice president and director of the company that she and her husband, Stanford, founded, when her life was cut short. “We are greatly saddened by…
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