Новости за 03.05.2017

Three recent pieces elicited a curious kind of reaction: Paul Berman on the story of the Weather Underground’s Judith Clark; David Samuels’ defense of the New York Times’ op-ed by Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti; and Liel Leibovitz’s latest on White House aide Sebastian Gorka. According to some critics, in the first two pieces we defended terrorists; in the third, Nazis. And by “we,” they meant the magazine as a whole.

For the first time since the 1980s, a secular student won Israel’s famed International Bible Contest (Chidon ha-Tanakh in Hebrew). The competition’s final rounds, held in Jerusalem on Yom Ha’atzmaut, are an annual televised event.

With the help of a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, has new resources to put toward its honorable mission of preserving and showcasing Yiddish literature and Jewish history. The $170,000 award, which could include up to $100,000 in additional matching funds, will support the Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, an online archive of video interviews about Yiddish, as well as Jewish language, history, and culture. The videos... Читать дальше...

America, meet Meir Adoni, a 44-year-old Moroccan-Israeli chef and a star in Tel Aviv’s dining scene. Last week, he introduced his modern approach to Middle Eastern cuisine to New York City with Nur—his first restaurant outside of his home city.

In the busyness of our contemporary life we are drawn into ceaseless activity that often separates us from the deeper dimension of our self. With our smart phones and computer screens we often remain caught on the surface of our lives, amidst the noise and chatter that continually distract us, that stops us from being rooted in our true nature. Unaware we are drowned deeper and deeper in a culture of soulless materialism.

One month before an Israeli-American teenager was arrested on suspicion of making more than 100 bomb threats against Jewish buildings across America, I visited Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s new leader, in his midtown Manhattan headquarters. The night before, the ADL’s San Francisco office had been targeted by a bomb threat. The previous week, the New York City office had been evacuated following a similar call. Greenblatt’s predecessor, Abraham Foxman, who ruled over the ADL for three decades... Читать дальше...