Under the cover of night, a 6-foot-tall (180-cm) granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments was removed from the Oklahoma Capitol grounds after judges said its placement on government land violated state law, officials said on Tuesday. The monument, which had drawn strong support from the Republican leadership of the socially conservative state, has been…
Members of the Oklahoma City Jewish community buried the remains of a Jewish Holocaust victim at a local cemetery. The traditional Jewish funeral was held Sunday at the Fairlawn Cemetery in the Oklahoma capital, The Oklahoman reported. A local minister had received the remains of the woman, a skull, from the daughter-in-law of a Jewish…
1) 4,650 Jews live in Oklahoma. 2) Isaac Lowenstein opened Oklahoma’s first vaudeville house in 1909. 3) Seymour Heyman, who ran The Hub clothing store owned the Oklahoma City Mets, a baseball team that played in the Southwestern League and Western Association in the first decade of the 20th century. 4) The inventor of the…
● American Innovations By Rivka Galchen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $24 The stories in Rivka Galchen’s “American Innovations,” aren’t all fantastical — although a fair number include elements of magic realism and science fiction — but even the most realistic stories in this collection have a kind of magical quality about them that…
Sholem Alechem, Oklahoma! The name of an oil field several miles out of Ardmore, Okla., is a puzzle to local residents. Some believe that it must commemorate a Native American site. After all, Oklahoma was once Indian Territory, and it is still flush with Native American reservations and local names, from Shawnee Twin Lakes to…
What do we know about the tornado that hit the Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday? And what can we learn from it? Specifically, how bad was it? How does it compare with other tornadoes? And was it related to climate change, as Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Barbara Boxer are charging? For starters, the tornado…
Jewish groups are joining the effort to help those displaced by the tornado in suburban Oklahoma City. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, announced Tuesday that his organization will collect donations and distribute them to the American Red Cross and others on the ground in Oklahoma. “We are numb with grief,…
I was sitting in a restaurant, having lunch with my family in Macon, Ga., when my great-uncle Herbert, a genealogist by hobby, proceeded to retell our family history. I had heard it many times before, but this time there was a twist. I had always thought that everyone on both sides of my family was…
