Saul Zabar is not a romantic. “There’s nothing poetic about this business,” he told The New York Times in 2008. Try telling that to the crowds swarming his Upper West Side store each Friday: grandmas shoving yuppies, yuppies shoving grandmas, everyone salivating over the lox. Zabar’s turns 80 this year, and Saul Zabar, its 86-year-old…
Nearly 50 years after Sandy Koufax declined to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers because it fell on Yom Kippur, foul-mouthed comedian Sarah Silverman went to work on the Day of Atonement. On Friday night, October 3, as many Jews elsewhere were in synagogue reciting the Kol…
A historically Jewish fraternity house at Emory University was targeted with anti-Semitic graffiti. The Alpha Epsilon Pi house was defaced with swastikas and other graffiti early Sunday morning in the hours after the end of Yom Kippur. Emory police officers have increased patrols in the area, University President Jim Wagner said in a statement. “On…
I vote to bring back the goat. In the days of the Temple on Yom Kippur, all sins were symbolically heaped on an actual goat — the original “scapegoat”— which was then sent off to some undefined land called Azazel. Leviticus 16:21: Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible…
Worried that your day-old infant won’t be forgiven on Yom Kippur? Maybe you should wave a chicken over his head. That’s the route one ultra-Orthodox woman has taken in a video circulating widely on WhatsApp and posted to the internet today by Yeshiva World News. It’s unclear where or when the video was recorded —…
In the boyhood days when I was still a more or less observant Jew, I always hated fasting on Yom Kippur. It struck me as the least spiritual thing I could do, since the more the hours went by with my empty stomach gnawing away at me, the more I could think of nothing but…
Peace Agreement: Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat with U.S. president Jimmy Carter at Camp David, 1978. // Copyright Wikimedia Commons Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ addresses at this year’s United Nations General Assembly were, well, not the friendliest. Netanyahu accused Abbas of war crimes. Abbas…
The West Bank was closed by the Israeli military ahead of Yom Kippur. Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon ordered the closure, which begins at 11:59 p.m. Thursday and will remain in effect until the same time on Saturday. Palestinians needing humanitarian assistance will be able to enter Israel with the permission of the Civil Administration. Ben…
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