This week, in response to the Trump administration’s declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared in a scathing speech that “Israel is a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Jews.” Abbas did not invent this characterization of Israel; it is a longstanding contention of anti-Zionists. Zionism’s…
A few weeks ago in these pages, Madi Norman, a student at the University of Chicago, argued that American Jewish institutions had lost sight of what matters to young people. The American Jewish establishment is obsessed with the boycott of Israel, argued Norman, when the truth is, for young people, it’s the occupation of millions…
ETERNAL LIFE: A NOVEL By Dara Horn W.W. Norton & Company, 256 pages, $25.95 Growing older, we wrestle with the brevity of life, the paucity of our accomplishments, the impossible desire for more time. Beset by nostalgia or regret, we may yearn for the chance to revisit our youth armed with middle-aged wisdom. In her…
Despite six days of feverish searching by family, friends and the police, it was the rain that finally uncovered the body of Blaze Bernstein. Around 2 p.m. on Tuesday, members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department found the 19-year-old in the brush that surrounds the sports fields of Borrego Park, in Orange County, California. Police…
Last October, at the Venice Film Festival, Palestinian actor Kamel el Basha won the Best Actor Volpi Cup for his performance in the Ziad Doueiri film “The Insult.” Basha, a respected but low profile theater actor in his first major film role, plays Yasser, a proud Palestinian refugee in Beirut who trades insults with Tony,…
In recalling Milt Rosenberg, the veteran Chicago radio host who died on January 9 at age 92, the first memory is of a soothing light baritone voice that might have been expected from a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Chicago, where he served as director of the doctoral program in social and…
By the time of his death in 1965, few would have taken Michal Waszynski for the director of one of the classics of Yiddish cinema. He had been living a surpassingly posh life in Rome, inhabiting a gorgeous urban estate with a social circle that included many of the luminaries of Hollywood and Italian cinema,…
Under the Nazi occupation of Poland, if a Jew in Vilna was caught bringing outside goods into the city’s ghetto, they risked paying with their life. Yet a group of Jewish writers and thinkers, a portion of those compelled by the Nazis to aid in the looting of Vilna’s storied institutions of Jewish culture, smuggled…
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