A Spanish political party reportedly has asked the regional government of Andalucia to authorize and encourage holding Jewish weddings in Cordoba’s historic synagogue. According to a report in Diario Cordoba, a local daily, the request came last month from the center-right PP group in the state parliament of Andalucia in southern Spain. It was meant…
Spain has announced that it will ease the naturalization of Sephardic Jews whose ancestors were expelled 500 years ago. Sephardic Jews already benefit from a preferential naturalization procedure that requires them to live in Spain for only two years before claiming citizenship. But the change, which was announced on Thursday, means that Jews will have…
Am I a Jew?: Lost Tribes, Lapsed Jews, and One Man’s Search For Himself By Theodore Ross Hudson Street Press, 280 pages, $25.95 There are hooks, and then there is the first sentence of Theodore Ross’s new book, “Am I a Jew?” which grabs you by the lapels and makes you instantly uncomfortable and intensely…
The Skirball Center, a sober cultural institution on Los Angeles’s ritzy Westside, was unusually alive on January 27. Music journalists, record executives and South American diplomats with an array of Spanish accents — from Argentina to Spain to East Los Angeles — bounced about the room. Along with the requisite contingent of L.A. yentas and…
The end of 2010 may have come and gone, but the end of winter — at least for most of us — is nowhere in sight. For those days when all you want to do is sit on the couch and eat microwave popcorn (and for me, this is about every day between December and…
Look at the bright side… Muslims here are hated even more than Jews! That’s the line Spanish government officials are using to mitigate the damage from a new survey suggesting one-third of Spaniards harbor anti-Semitic sentiments. According to AFP, The “Study on anti-Semitism in Spain” revealed 34.6 percent of Spaniards had an “unfavourable opinion” of…
In her light, lilting accent, Flory Jagoda is happy to tell the story of her life, with one caveat: although she did live through it, hers is not a tale of the Holocaust. “This one is an accordion story,” she laughed. “We have so many Holocaust stories.” For all intents and purposes, Jagoda’s accordion saved…
Aharon Lapid has penned a strange article on the Spanish Civil War and fascist leader Francisco Franco for the right-wing Orthodox weekly The Jewish Press. I’ll readily agree to the following points: The Spanish Civil War was not an entirely black-and-white affair. The Republican cause was sullied by violence and hijacked by Stalinists. The oft-romanticized…
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