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 ...

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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 ...

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; ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Israel’s American-born ambassador to Washington, D.C., Michael Oren, finally broke his silence this week about his views on the fledgling lobbying group J Street, which takes a progressive stance on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to the Forward, Oren told delegates to the Conservative movement’s biennial convention at a breakfast last Monday that ...

Hey, remember a couple of weeks ago when the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said that in the absence of negotiations with the Israelis, the Palestinians would just go ahead and declare statehood unilaterally? Well, not so much. Yesterday, a delegation of Americans from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs met in Ramallah with ...