Новости за 21.04.2017

In response to “Torah Learning for Jewish Youth” by Mark Oppenheimer:

I found it disappointing that Mark Oppenheimer missed the central flaw of Rabbi Salkin’s, B’nai Mitzvah Torah Commentary, which is that Jewish law does not require a 13-year-old boy to read from the Torah to become a bar mitzvah. That practice is a Reform construct not based in halakha. In fact, boys at the age of 13 automatically become a bar mitzvah whether they do anything or not to commemorate it. The same holds true of girls at 12. Читать дальше...

Full disclosure: The new movie Norman, directed by Joseph Cedar, was edited by the husband of a close friend and former debate partner from my college days; was produced by another college acquaintance; was filmed in part at the Upper West Side Synagogue that my wife’s sister used to attend; was filmed in at least one other part near the Upper West Side block where my family lived when I was born; is about the Jews, a wandering tribe of which I am a member; involves Israel, a country that would... Читать дальше...

Restless waiting for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to return? Eager to see what mishegas Rachel Bloom’s character, the blundering, well-intentioned but often misguided Jewy feminist Rebecca Bunch has in store for us in Season 3? Me too. Have no fear, fellow fans: Bloom has released a new parody music video to tide us over. Produced by Vanity Fair, “Lady Boss” is right in Rebecca Bunch’s wheelhouse: It’s about navigating the challenges confronted by women in positions of authority.

Next Monday, April 24, marks a historic event for Hollywood, America, and the rest of the world—and no, it’s not because it’s the day the results of the Writers’ Guild Strike Authorization Vote will be announced, although I’m sure that’s on your mind. For on this momentous day, Barbra Joan Streisand, a woman so legendary she requires no facetiously pithy introduction to any of my readership, will be 75 years old. That’s right. We have, on this here Planet Earth, now experienced three quarters of a century of Streisand. Читать дальше...

Here we all are, recovering from Passover. I don’t think anyone can put it better than Oprah does.

When New York Times bestselling author Annabelle Gurwitch was growing up in Alabama—or where the “Shalom y’all” Jews live in the South—she fantasized about having a family. That is, any family but her own. In her new essay collection Wherever You Go, There You Are, Gurwitch writes about her “cast of epically dysfunctional relatives” and her own family of “bootleggers, gamblers, and philanderers, as well as the sisterhoods, temporary tribes, and communities who have become surrogates along the way.”

Gurwitch... Читать дальше...

For Yom HaShoah, Israel Story brings us the story of Lizzie Doron, an Israeli author who was born in Tel Aviv in the early 1950s. Like many others of her generation growing up with parents who were Holocaust survivors, Doron had a childhood filled with silence. Her questions about the family’s past were, more often than not, left unanswered or ignored. So, in a neighborhood where traumatic memories were relived on a nightly basis, she had to fill in the blanks of her own story imaginatively. And in her mind, Doron wasn’t alone. Читать дальше...

The Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe is located in Berlin’s central government district, one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations. A short walk north is Brandenburg Gate, and beyond that the Reichstag. To the west is Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest park. To the east is a group of stores and restaurants catering to tourists, nicknamed “the Holocaust beach” by the German press. Nearby are three more memorials: the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism; the Memorial to the... Читать дальше...

I know how to make America great again.

I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, as I might’ve said once or twice before, at dinner parties, in these pages, or on National Public Radio. But seeing the president behave more like a commander in chief these past two weeks than his predecessor had in eight years in office—destroying one-fifth of Bashar al-Assad’s air force while enjoying a scrumptious chocolate cake, dropping 21,000 lbs. of explosive justice on ISIS scum in Afghanistan—gave me an... Читать дальше...

I didn’t want to reach this state, on my back with limbs stretched out.

The New York Times has apologized for printing an op-ed by Marwan Barghouti, in which the charismatic Palestinian Che-in-the-making was identified as a “Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.” It seems that by identifying the face of a thousand BDS banners as a “leader and parliamentarian,” which he is, and not also as a head of the Tanzim militia who was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences by an Israeli civilian criminal court for three terror attacks in which five Israelis were murdered during the Second Intifada... Читать дальше...

A letter circulating through Congress, Tablet has learned, is collecting signatures from members of the House in the hopes of pressuring President Donald Trump to dismiss his counter-terrorism advisor, Sebastian Gorka, due to what the letter describes as “troubling associations with a number of anti-Semitic organizations.”