Новости за 13.02.2018

This past December, the Board of Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts elected its first woman president, Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld. Anisfeld will oversee an institution approaching its centennial that confers a wide range of degrees, including rabbinic and cantorial ordination. She will take on the challenge of balancing Hebrew College’s pluralism with the varied opinions and levels of observance within the institution while “shaping an overall renewed vision for the college.” In a recent interview with Tablet... Читать дальше...

In January, just a few weeks away from the forthcoming parliamentary elections in Italy, a candidate from the Northern League party visited a local radio station for an interview. When asked about the issue of immigration, the candidate said: “We must choose if our ethnicity, the white race, our society, should continue existing or if it should be erased. It’s not a matter of xenophobia or racism,” he continued. “We can’t accept everyone.”

On Feb. 2, Philip Rees, a Doha-based Manager of Investigations at Al Jazeera, sent letters to several U.S.-based Jewish and pro-Israel organizations—along with various current and former employees of those organizations—informing them that they will likely be featured in an upcoming documentary “concerning the role of pro-Israel advocacy groups in the United States.” Qatar-based Al Jazeera is a subsidiary of the regime-owned Qatar Media Corporation and its coverage often reflects the monarchy’s pro-Islamist leanings... Читать дальше...

I should preface this by saying that the Winter Olympics bore me to tears and that my understanding of its strange customs are, charitably put, limited. What is the difference between ice dancing and figure skating? How does one judge a snowboarding competition with points? How do the knees of downhill skiers not just, like, spontaneously combust?

This past Sunday, The New York Times treated its readers to another sad story straight out of Gaza. Here’s a representative sample: “’We are dead, but we have breath,’ said Zakia Abu Ajwa, 57, who now cooks greens normally fed to donkeys for her three small grandchildren.”

Since the Hollywood premiere of Marvel Studio’s latest superhero flick, Black Panther, the interwebs have been all atwitter with buzz and anticipation for its opening this Friday.

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

Author’s Note: The recent controversy aroused by the amendments to the law on the Institute of National Memory passed by the Polish government shows how quickly the progress made in this article—first published in 2010 and reprinted here—can be undermined. I fully recognize that the use of terms such as “Polish concentration camps” and collective accusations of participation in genocide against the “Polish Government” or the “Polish Nation” is offensive. However, I have serious doubts about the use of the law to deal with this problem. Читать дальше...

A release last week of texts showed that Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose memos regarding the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia are referred to as the Steele dossier, reached out to Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, through a Russian-linked Washington, D.C., lobbyist named Adam Waldman. Among Waldman’s clients is Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a text dated Mar. Читать дальше...