Senior Writer Allison Hoffman thinks being a journalist is the best job in the world. As the New York correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, she went to the Oscars, watched Bernard Madoff get handcuffed, and talked to David Lynch about how transcendental meditation can solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She’s also worked for the Associated Press, in its San Diego bureau, and The New Yorker, as a fact-checker. She began her career at the Los Angeles Times, where she contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the 2003 wildfires. Allison earned her undergraduate degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, and graduated from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2003.
A new French film examines a case of philo-Semitism gone terribly awry
| 7:00 AM Jan 22, 2010
Life isn’t easy for Jeanne Fabre, the character at the center of the new French film The Girl on the Train. She’s a flighty airhead stuck in the Parisian suburbs with no job, a boyfriend who’s caught up in some shady business, and an overbearing mother pretty enough to be played by Catherine Deneuve. One ...
Leib Tropper spent his way into the rabbinic elite—and, even after his fall, those other rabbis are unwilling to condemn him
| 7:00 AM Jan 19, 2010
In May 2007, Leib Tropper arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, to preside over a grand conclave of prospective converts to Judaism sponsored by his Eternal Jewish Family organization, which offered “Cadillac conversions” to non-Jews as part of an effort to seize control of the conversion process outside of Israel. Buoyed by a $4.8 million infusion of ...
A look at Guma Aguiar, who with his uncle bankrolled a New York rabbi trying to control the standards for conversion to Judaism
| 7:00 AM Jan 15, 2010
Guma Aguiar, the 32-year-old multimillionaire who helped precipitate the downfall of the ultra-Orthodox rabbi Leib Tropper, was committed by court order to a mental hospital near Tel Aviv yesterday, according to Israeli news reports. Aguiar and his billionaire uncle, Thomas Kaplan, have bankrolled Tropper’s efforts to gain control of the stringently regulated process of conversion ...
How a New York rabbi tried to remake the rules on converting to Judaism, until a sex tape—and a family feud between his wealthy backers—brought him down
| 7:00 AM Jan 13, 2010
This is the first in a series.
December was a very bad month for Rabbi Leib Tropper, a powerful ultra-Orthodox rabbi who has been seeking to determine the standards for conversion in Israel and throughout the world through his little-known yet influential organization, Eternal Jewish Family. First, black-and-white posters appeared on walls in Jerusalem and other ...
Rosenthal, former J Street advisor, tell us she’s still packing for D.C.
| 3:02 PM Dec 28, 2009
Is Hannah Rosenthal, the State Department’s new anti-Semitism czar, doomed to become the next Van Jones—an administration official whose impolitic comments force her departure? Last week, she told Haaretz that Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s recent criticism of the progressive Israel lobbying group J Street was “most unfortunate.” The remarks prompted several Jewish leaders to complain; ...
But at least Benedict’s been to Yad Vashem!
| 3:00 PM Dec 21, 2009
Over the weekend, the German-born Pope Benedict XVI moved Pope Pius XII one step closer to sainthood, prompting immediate outrage from Jewish groups who contend that Pius, who was Eugenio Pacelli before being elected pontiff in 1939, didn’t do enough to prevent the Nazi slaughter of Jews (let alone its persecution of Catholic priests). Rabbi ...
Why nothing has happened and everybody has won
| 1:00 PM Dec 16, 2009
Last night, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 412-12 in favor of legislation intended to punish Iran for pursuing its nuclear program. But the bill, introduced by Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat (and, yes, Jewish), would not directly impose sanctions on Iran itself; rather, it would bar the mostly European oil companies that do ...
How two middle class civil servants amassed a world class art collection
| 7:00 AM Dec 16, 2009
The bathroom wall of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel’s rent-stabilized apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where they’ve lived since 1963, happens to have been decorated years ago with a pencil drawing by the artist Sol LeWitt. Another piece of his—a black wooden floor structure—sat in the living room, next to works by superstars like Chuck ...
“Smart, Jewish Keynesian” somehow succeeded
| 10:00 AM Dec 14, 2009
It is a bit ironic that yesterday, when the New York Times posted its obituary of the M.I.T. economist Paul A. Samuelson on its home page, the story immediately to the left reported the latest economic proclamation by Larry Summers, the former Harvard president who is now President Obama’s chief economic adviser, and who was ...
Orthodox group’s head meets with, praises adviser Axelrod
| 3:00 PM Dec 11, 2009
We have absolutely no idea whether Rabbi Yehiel M. Kalish, the Chicago-based director of government affairs for the Orthodox advocacy group Agudath Israel, was among the 500 or so people to score a coveted invitation to next week’s White House Hanukkah party. However, he did apparently get to spend 45 “quality minutes” in the West ...