Repeat Offender

NEXTBOOK — November 26, 2008
Was there ever a more favorable time to be an American in Germany? I wasn’t here during the Berlin airlift as the sky filled with small parachuted packages of raisins floating down from U.S. bomber planes. So maybe then. But the symbolic weight of Obama’s win seemed to redeem us all [...]

They That Were Lost

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW — October 12, 2008
In the eighth century B.C., a hundred years before the Judeans were dropped by the river of Babylon, a different Jewish tribe, the Israelites, were also marched out of their ancient kingdom to begin a long exile. Unlike their Baghdadi brethren who would go on to [...]

Dropped Ball

NEXTBOOK — September 24, 2008
The owners of the Jets and Giants football teams decided last week to reject a bid by the German insurance company Allianz for naming rights to their new Meadowlands stadium. It seemed there was little else they could do after the New York Times reminded everyone that this was the company [...]

Kissinger, Unearthed

FORWARD — July 25, 2007
Henry Kissinger and the American Century
By Jeremi Suri
Belknap Press, 368 pages, $27.95.
Henry Kissinger is probably going to regret the day in 1979 when he said this: “The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in [...]

US Jews at Forefront of Organizing Rally for Darfur

JERUSALEM POST — April 28, 2006
Thousands of people will be marching this Sunday in Washington DC under a banner that carries a simple two- word demand: “Save Darfur.”
This is the name of the coalition organizing the rally, the first public action of its size intended to focus attention on the past three years of mass [...]

50 Years Later a World of Holocaust Memories is Exposed

JERUSALEM POST — April 14, 2006
For most Holocaust survivors coping with life after the war meant forgetting the past placing the memories of lost people and places in a metaphorical box and leaving it shut.
This was what Sala Garncarz did. After five years in seven different labor camps and losing her parents and much of [...]

Jewish Senator Bids For US Presidency

JERUSALEM POST — March 21, 2006
Russell Feingold the Democratic senator from Wisconsin immediately raised his public profile here this past week when he stood up in Congress demanding that President George W. Bush be censured over his domestic eavesdropping program which Feingold considers illegal.
His proposal – a congressional action that has only been used once [...]

Jewish Theological Seminary Students Struggle With Movement’s Delay On Gay Rabbis Marriage

JERUSALEM POST — March 12, 2006
The flyer with Jay Michaelson’s young, serious face underneath the word “MISSING” lay on a table at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the premier rabbinical school for the Conservative Judaism movement in America.
Michaelson, as the leaflet explained, is a graduate student in religious studies at the Hebrew University, a writer [...]

Hillary Clinton Tells Supporters of Bar-Ilan that Hamas Must Be Isolated

JERUSALEM POST — March 7, 2006
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton dressed in cap and gown and saying her mother always wanted a doctor accepted an honorary degree from Bar-Ilan University Sunday night.
The ceremony was held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in midtown Manhattan.Some 300 people attended the black-tie evening marking the university’s 50th anniversary.

The Personal Allure of Religion

JERUSALEM POST — March 3, 2006
What would make someone like Allan Leicht – a successful Emmy-award winning television producer of the sitcom Kate and Allie and a typically non-religious American Jew – suddenly decide in the middle of his life to start keeping kosher praying three times a day studying Torah and resting on Shabbat?
Was [...]