Craig Breslow, an Oakland Athletics relief pitcher, has been called the smartest man in baseball more than once. And after graduating from Yale with a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and nearly matriculating at NYU’s medical school, the title isn’t necessarily unwarranted. But Breslow, a “proud” Jew and New Haven native, is getting some…
Sitting around the table — four young women, all of us had lost one of our parents — we told the stories that we always tell or never tell: when we knew it was inevitable (cancer was the cause of death in every situation), where we were when we had to drop everything and come…
Come Yom Kippur, employees at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport might have to atone for scrambling thousands of passengers’ travel plans. On Monday, during one of Israel’s busiest travel periods of the year, the Israel Airports Authority employees union declared a strike; by late yesterday, the strike had been settled, Haaretz reported. But the damage had…
At first glance, the ads echo the old “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye” ads — the ones featuring distinctly non-Semitic faces in ecstasy over Jewish rye bread. But in a $100,000 campaign that launches this week, the punims belong to scandal-bitten celebrities. And the look-alike ads tout the…
As many can attest, going to synagogue isn’t as easy as putting on a rumpled shirt and tie or throwing on the same dress as the previous week. For better or worse, what you wear to shul is often a fashion statement. And as the High Holidays roll in this September, perhaps no group acknowledges…
Israeli Arabs may soon make your Yom Kippur fast easier. It’s often said that Jews and Muslims have a lot in common when it comes to religious observance, and that’s rarely highlighted better than when it comes to fasting. Both religions require full-on fasting several times a year. Now there’s a theory that a drug…
This song has been around for two or three years, but I just came across it on the Ynet.co.il Web site and was blown away. The lyric is El Nora Alila, a liturgical piyyut poem written in the early 12th century by the immortal Spanish-Jewish poet and philosopher Moses Ibn Ezra. The singer is Meir…
As the Bintel Blog reported the kapparot ceremony, during which sins are symbolically transferred to money or a bird ahead of Yom Kippur, has been causing some controversy in the U.Sm. Likewise here in Israel. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Tel Aviv-Jaffa is campaigning hard against those who perform the ceremony…
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