Новости за 01.05.2018

Why was the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt demoted by Starbucks after having been originally named as one of four leaders of an upcoming bias training program?

Tony season is upon us! This morning brought the announcement for the nominees for the annual Broadway awards show, and it is looking to be very Jewish this year.

Over the last few months, Israel’s premier hospital, Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, has sent delegations of medical experts on several humanitarian missions around the world. Most notably, a team traveled to Lusaka, Zambia, to help contain a deadly outbreak of cholera, while a group of ophthalmologists is currently in Papua New Guinea, performing eye surgeries in remote villages.

Who is responsible for the Holocaust?

It’s a question that had long lingered in the mind of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who used his 1982 doctoral dissertation to question the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis and to argue that the Final Solution was secretly agreed upon by Hitler and the Zionist leadership eager for a way to justify its colonialist project.

Continue reading "BREAKING: Mahmoud Abbas Still a Holocaust-Denying Loon" at...

A middle-aged couple is sitting and waiting for their coffee machine to spit out the java. To pass the time, the husband regales the wife with a bit of gossip: A cab driver, he says, just told him about this suburb up the river where no one ever lied and, as a result, no one died before their time. One night, this guy was relaxing at home while his wife was in the shower when a neighbor came knocking and asking if the wife was home. Now the guy, not wanting to interrupt his wife, said she wasn’t... Читать дальше...

Sergey Abgorian

“All I wanted to do was to join the Red army and get out of Armenia. I lied with my age as I was only 17 years old. I was lucky as the recruitment officer decided not to worry about this little detail and made me sign the official recruitment document.” —Sergey Abgorian in Yerevan, Armenia, spring 2007. (All photos: Jonathan Alpeyrie)

Born in Bert, Armenia, on Nov. 16, 1924. Abgorian volunteered in June 1941, but was turned down because of his age. A year later, aged 17 and nine months... Читать дальше...

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

All the people in our circle—brokers, shopkeepers, bank clerks, and steamship office workers—taught their children music. Our fathers, seeing no future for themselves, came up with a lottery. They played it out on the bones of little people. More than any other city, Odessa was possessed with this madness. And it’s true—for decades our city supplied the concert halls of the entire world with wunderkinds. Mischa Elman, Zimbalist, Gabrilowitsch came from Odessa, and Jascha Heifetz started out in our city. Читать дальше...

“Skibet,” Marian Marzyński tells us, was the first Danish word he learned: it means “boat.” In 1969, Marzyński found himself living on such a vessel, permanently anchored in the port of Copenhagen along with 500 other Polish-Jewish refugees who had fled to Denmark in the wake of an “anti-Zionist” campaign waged by the Polish government. In Poland, Marzyński had been first a radio reporter and then a successful television show producer and documentary filmmaker. With the help of Danish television... Читать дальше...

Watching the late 1960s Soviet animated series starring Cheburashka, “a beast of unknown origins,” was an important marker of childhood in the last decades of communist power. Ask any person who grew up in the Eastern bloc about “the Soviet Mickey Mouse” and they will likely break out in song in Cheburashka’s cloyingly naïve voice: “I was once a strange no-name toy, whom no one wanted in the store and now I’m Cheburashka…” The series, an adaptation of writer Edouard Uspenskii’s children’s tales... Читать дальше...

I wrote this poem after hearing of the Polish government’s legislation limiting discussion of the Shoah. Most, if not all, societies try to suppress the disturbing events of their past. It is the role of historians, artists, and activists to remind them of their buried misdeeds.