A wave of Jews actually came to El Salvador centuries ago, to escape the Spanish Inquisition. They were forced to practice Judaism in secret.
Northern European kingdoms painted the Spanish Empire as “constitutionally evil; not just a political, religious and military rival,” the author said.
Here’s something no one expected: A reputable conservative magazine has published a column defending … The Spanish Inquisition.
The laws follow economic recessions and vigorous attempts by Lisbon and Madrid to attract wealthy investors, residents and tourists.
How do you sum up 500 years of Sephardic history in just a couple of illustrations? That’s the challenge Kurt Hoffman had to answer in the pages of the Forward.
Aristides Sousa Mendes is in search of his past. His grandfather is lionized for saving Jews from the Nazis in Portugal-but it wasn’t always that way.
Before Golda, and even before Herzl, there was Dona Gracia Nasi, the 16th-century Zionist, feminist, and the Harriet Tubman of the Jewish people. She is one of the most remarkable women in Jewish history — and in history, period. It’s a tragedy that so few people know her name.
Jewish day school graduates mostly want to study the Holocaust. A college lecturer asks if they should focus more on cultural empowerment, like their classmates from other groups.
Well, here it is, Saturday night. Some time around 8:30 I observe that Shabbes is over, so I crank up the old laptop to see what’s new and catch up with my Forward fan mail. My latest column on Palestinian statehood had some pretty lively back-and-forth going on as of Friday evening, and I’m eager to see what new pearls of Torah have been shared while I was off-line.
The news this week is chock-full of outrage over the Israeli naval action that Turkey and others are calling an act of naked piracy on the high seas. And in the week’s other top story, by incredible coincidence, the oil slick oozing across the Gulf of Mexico made its first major landfall Thursday at, of all places, Grand Isle in Barataria Bay at the mouth of the Mississippi, 15 miles south of New Orleans. Barataria and its three islets are probably best known as the place where a private kingdom was established around 1800 by the greatest Jewish pirate of them all, Jean Lafitte.