Новости за 23.10.2017

Being a Chabad emissary in Tel Aviv is hardly any easier than it is anywhere else. Sure, you don’t have to go around asking people if they’re Jewish, but you do have to contend with city hall asking if you’ve got a permit for those phylacteries: This past Friday, a Chabad rabbi doing his work at a booth in the city’s tony Ramat Aviv neighborhood was approached by a municipal inspector and warned that he lacked the proper license necessary to ask passersby if they’d like to put on a pair of tefillin. Читать дальше...

This may come as a bit of a shock to readers of this magazine, but, in Israel, many things are controversial, including things that really shouldn’t be. Like supermodels and their life choices: The newest social media derecho involves one Bar Refaeli, who this weekend gave birth to her second daughter, Elle.

Life in Hamas-governed Gaza is a festering hell, with 96 percent of the strip’s water reportedly unsafe to drink, most of its electrical infrastructure having collapsed, and more than 40 percent of its population unemployed. Addressing these issues, the terrorist organization has responded by using children as human shields, embezzling humanitarian aid funds, and stepping up its efforts to smuggle weapons and tactical aids into Gaza.

In 1923, Dietirch Gefken was one of the thugs who marched with his idol, Adolf Hitler, as the latter launched his disastrous Beer Hall Putsch. He was the sort of gentleman who was not above killing the occasional foe or throwing acid in the faces of those who had irked him. Disheartened by his prospects in the Fatherland, Gefken traveled to the United States, where—as a new book, published this week, reveals—he began orchestrating a forgotten but utterly cinematic attempt to take over Hollywood on behalf of his Fuhrer. Читать дальше...

Later this week, Yad Vashem will for the first time recognize an Arab, Dr. Mohamed Helmy, as a Righteous Among the Nations for saving the lives of four of his Jewish friends in the Holocaust.

Histories written about the “Great Immigration” of 2 million Russian Jews to the United States during the years 1881–1914, all cite Russian oppression, poverty, and pogroms as central reasons for the exodus. But another salient cause is rarely noted or publicized: the restrictive, self-interested, and anti-democratic leadership of their own Jewish communities.

Judging by her Instagram feed, one would guess Melissa Weller is a nice Jewish baker and a nice Jewish girl. She dutifully posts appropriate pastries on appropriate days (“Happy New Year! #honeycake” reads one caption dated Sept. 21), and other Jewish baked goods on regular old days, just because. There are the burekas sprinkled with sesame seeds that she crafts for Walnut Street Café, a new restaurant in Philadelphia where Weller is the head baker. There are the bagels she made for a “Bagels... Читать дальше...

Judging by her Instagram feed, one would guess Melissa Weller is a nice Jewish baker and a nice Jewish girl. She dutifully posts appropriate pastries on appropriate days (“Happy New Year! #honeycake” reads one caption dated Sept. 21), and other Jewish baked goods on regular old days, just because. There are the burekas sprinkled with sesame seeds that she crafts for Walnut Street Café, a new restaurant in Philadelphia where Weller is the head baker. There are the bagels she made for a “Bagels... Читать дальше...

Tell me to close my eyes, change the author’s name and all the place names, read slowly aloud the first page, and I will still know right away that Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows is Russian. It has that dynamic, shifting prose, incisive attention to detail and gesture, as if the busywork of our hands says more about us than anything else; gutting portrait-work that latches onto a character’s least-attractive qualities before softening them with something warm. It folds back an observation onto itself... Читать дальше...

[In] this country there was a time when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist Party. If you were not somewhere within the party’s wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition. In either case, it was the Communist Party that ultimately determined what you were to think about and in what terms.