Новости за 15.07.2016

It’s been quite a few months for the Republican Party and presumptive presidential candidate, Donald Trump, whose star continues to rise despite, well, a lot: Over the course of the last four-and-a-half months, Trump (as outlined by our Trump Watch column), has done his very best to alienate and offend (deep breath) black people, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, women, the disabled, and pretty much anyone who isn’t him.

It’s rare in the celebrity world that you get really, really good gossip, the kind where you feel like you basically know the people involved and exactly what the real story is—as though you went to camp with them.

Haskel Lookstein—the longtime rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York City, and former principal of the Ramaz School, a Modern Orthodox Day school on the Upper East Side—has cancelled his scheduled appearance at the RNC in Cleveland next week.

One by one, three Israeli public figures—Amir Peretz, Tzipi Livni, and Danny Halutz—took the stage on Thursday to face a packed Tel Aviv auditorium to speak to military veterans and members of the public. Also in attendance was a large contingent of research officers from the IDF’s Intelligence Corps, who are tasked with analyzing the current threats to Israel. None of them had served in the IDF during the Second Lebanon War—on July 12, 2006, the day that marked the beginning of the 34-day conflict, they were likely in summer camp. Читать дальше...

The Trump campaign’s fundraising difficulties are well-documented by now, with the real estate developer’s presidential effort raising a mere $3 million in May alone. Now, Trump’s toxicity among the mainline Republican donor class has apparently bled over into the Republican National Committee and its flagship event.

It’s been decades since a major party presidential candidate had a harder case to make to American Jewish voters than Donald Trump. Trump has supported policies that sit uneasily with American Jews, and shown what some deem to be an alarming tolerance for anti-Semitic supporters and even a tone-deaf enthusiasm for some of their iconography. At the same time, Trump is the father of an Orthodox Jew and counts Jews among his closest advisers and supporters. Few other serious presidential candidates... Читать дальше...

In honor of what would have been U.S. Representative and women’s rights leader Bella Abzug’s 97th birthday (she was born on July 24, 1920), I paid a visit to a show at the Marc Straus Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side called “If Only Bella Abzug Were Here.” The group exhibition runs through July 29 and “commemorates the life and achievements of Bella Abzug with a selection of works by both established and emerging female artists.”

Europe is to Tzipi Livni what an ostentatious mansion is to a certain kind of rapper: a natural habitat, a status symbol, a promise of redemption. As a young woman, Livni was recruited by the Mossad and tasked with pretending to be the proprietress of a Paris apartment that doubled as a secret safe house. No slouches at judging character, the Mossad’s spymasters realized that Livni was precisely the sort of anodyne presence Europeans imagine as the platonic ideal of an Israeli: well-mannered, well-meaning... Читать дальше...

She had killed him right there, on that soft October afternoon at the Sabbath table, still littered with the remains of a decadent dessert. With a purse of her lips, an apologetic smile, her eyes twinkling and then a laugh.

Haskel Lookstein—the rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side since 1958, and longtime principal of Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox Day school near the synagogue—will deliver an invocation at the Republican National Convention next week. A petition is currently circulating online, which says that “to embrace Trump and Trumpism goes against all we’ve been taught.”