The latest battle in the ideological war over Israel/Palestine took place the other day at a high school outside Boston. Andover High had invited a pro-Palestinian group called Wheels of Justice to talk at the school. Local Jewish groups rose…
Yes, Barack Obama is black, but he’s really only half-black—”[my father] was black as pitch, my mother white as milk,” he says in his autobiography. I think this may make him more acceptable as a presidential candidate. It’s not strictly…
In her 1997 autobiography, the late Katharine Graham of the Washington Post described her father as an assimilating Jew who didn’t talk about his Jewishness to his Episcopal-church-going children. He was “involved in Jewish charities, causes, and international issues. “He…
Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, who died at age 97 in 1990, has a place in American Jewish history. Her grandfather, Isaac M. Wise, founded the first Jewish seminary in the U.S., the Hebrew Union College. Her father, Adolph Ochs, bought the…
The Nazis’ extermination of Gypsies was nearly as complete, proportionally, as the Nazis’ extermination of European Jews. Yet the commemoration of Gypsy victims of the Holocaust has never come even close to the memorialization of Jewish victims. In her fine…
The Forward prints a frontpage article about the UN and Israel that characterizes support for Israel as the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people” (penned by Eve Epstein, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary). I’m confused by this….
Deborah Gardner Let’s add one thing to Gerald Ford’s legacy: the greatest scandal in Peace Corps history, the freeing of a murderer to save the image of the agency, and to try to preserve Pres. Ford’s reelection hopes in ’76….
In Tuesday’s New York Sun, editor Seth Lipsky refers to the Six-Day war of 1967 in typical fashion, saying that Ariel Sharon “saved the Jewish state” by enveloping the Egyptians in the Sinai. Lipsky’s view of the war is unreconstructed…
I spent Christmas Eve at two parties in LA hosted by Jews—friends of my gentile brother-in-law. Didn’t plan it that way; just worked out that way. The first party was all film industry. I asked the host’s daughter about being…