Jewish News

Jews Around the World Usher in Hanukkah

Jews around the world ushered in the eight-day Hanukkah festival Saturday evening, lighting the first candles of ceremonial lamps that symbolize triumph over oppression.In Israel, families gathered after sundown for the lighting, eating traditional snacks of potato pancakes and doughnuts and exchanging gifts.Local officials lit candles set up in public places, while families displayed the nine-candle lamps, called menorahs, in ...

Jews and Politics: How Are Politicians Judged?

With the recent scandalous resignation of Congressman Anthony Weiner, many began to question what is wrong with our politicians: why is it that these men would be willing to sacrifice everything for a few hours of enjoyment? The question, I believe, is – why do they fall prey to this type of behavior in the first place?Congressman Weiner’s situation was ...

Jewish Writer-Filmmaker, Nora Ephron, Dies at 71

Nora Ephron, the essayist, author and filmmaker who challenged and thrived in the male-dominated worlds of movies and journalism, and was loved, respected and feared for her wit, died on Tuesday of leukemia. She was 71.Her book publisher Alfred A. Knopf confirmed her death in a statement.Born into a Jewish family of screenwriters, Ephron was a top journalist in her ...

Jewish Women Opting for Single Motherhood

When Emily Wolper broke her engagement six years ago, she promised herself that if the time came when she felt ready to have a child and she was still single, she’d have one on her own.Now 37, Wolper, a college admissions consultant in Morristown, N.J., is undergoing in-vitro fertilization treatments. If all goes according to plan, Wolper will join the ...

‘Jewish WikiLeaks’ goes live in Jerusalem

“A breakthrough in journalism research,” the director of the National Library of Israel, Oren Weinberg, called the institution’s project to scan and upload to the Internet hundreds of thousands of pages from Jewish newspapers from the 19th century to the present.Historical Jewish Press, whose official launch was on Monday, is a joint initiative of the national library and Tel Aviv ...

Jewish voters don’t reflexively back Rahm Emanuel for Chicago mayor

Some might assume that the idea of a Rahm Emanuel candidacy for mayor would be cause for celebration along Devon Avenue, the longtime rialto of Chicago’s Jewish community.After all, Emanuel attended an Orthodox synagogue before going from Chicago to the White House, and his family is highly respected in West Rogers Park, where his father, Benjamin, was a pediatrician. The ...

Jewish vote not a ‘problem’ for Obama, polls show

National surveys conducted by Gallup International show that American Jews have approved of Obama’s job performance throughout his presidency by an average of 14 percentage points more than the rest of the American electorate. This gap undercuts a frequently made, but factually erroneous, claim that Obama has a policy toward Israel that alienates Jewish voters, leading Gallup to conclude that ...

Jewish Visitor to Temple Mount Told to Remove Kippah

During a visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on Wednesday morning, a Jewish student was told by Islamic Waqf officials to take off his kippah. The 20-year-old from London, England, was in Israel as part of a student mission. He said he was told by three separate Waqf monitors to take off the Jewish head-covering because it was offensive ...

Jewish teenage literature tackles cultural taboos

Bullying, suicide, abuse. In recent years, the genre of Jewish teenage literature has tackled subjects once considered so taboo, not even the most progressive authors would touch them.These “problem novels,” as they are called — exemplified recently by books like “Gravity,” by Leanne Lieberman, in which a teenage girl from an Orthodox family realizes she is a lesbian, and “Hush,” ...

Jewish Studies in Decline?

Reports prepared recently for Israel’s Council of Higher Education have brought despairing news about the condition of the humanities in the country’s universities. Especially dispiriting is the report on Jewish studies, once the crowning glory of Israel’s flagship Hebrew University—and, in the report’s inadvertently nostalgic words, “an investment in the nurturing of the deep spiritual and cultural structures of Israeli ...

Jewish student suing UC Berkeley

A University of California, Berkeley student is suing the edcuational institution for allegedly failing to protect her from an anti-Semitic attack.In her suit, Jessica Felber, 20, claims that Husam Zakharia, a fellow student and the head of Students for Justice in Palestine, slammed her metal cart into Felber because of the pro-Israel sign she was holding during a pro-Israel demonstration ...

Jewish state under attack

The 1930s were particularly fruitful immigration years for Jewish Palestine. Jewish immigration also peaked in 1935, just months before Palestinian Arabs began a full-scale, nation-wide revolt. In the four years between 1933 and 1936 more than 164,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, and between 1931 and 1936 the Jewish population more than doubled from 175,000 to 370,000 people, increasing the ...