Everyone knows that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) is an Orthodox Jew, and everyone knows that observant Jews don’t do work on Shabbat. But we also know that for every rule there is an exception, and this weekend Lieberman exercised one—literally—in order to be present for the Senate debate on the health-care reform bill. On Saturday, ...

The old brick synagogue on Orchard Street in New Haven, Connecticut is disintegrating. In the decade or so that the 60-odd families who make up Congregation Beth Israel have been trying to raise the $1.5 million it will cost to renovate the once-thriving Orthodox shul—or even the $300,000 it will take to make the most ...

In case you haven’t heard, the Israeli economy is—contrary to all expectations—doing pretty well these days, despite the recession dragging on in the United States and in Europe. It’s doing so well, in fact, that Bank of Israel chief Stanley Fischer decided last week to raise interest rates to counteract rising inflation. Why? Well, William ...

Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, announced earlier this week that they’re siding with the Susan G. Komen breast-cancer awareness organization and telling women to keep getting annual mammograms starting at 40—not at 50, and only every other year, as a federally funded task force recommended last week. Valerie Lowenstein, Hadassah’s national chair for ...

In September of 1789, Congress passed a resolution declaring a “public day of thanksgiving and prayer,” but, in the rush of last-minute business before an autumn recess, left it up to the president to actually pick a date for the holiday. A few days later, George Washington, following a loose precedent set by the Continental ...

A Jewish gadfly in Miami Beach is protesting the date of next spring’s special election to fill the seat being vacated by Boca Raton Rep. Robert Wexler, a Democrat, because it falls on the last day of Passover. The Associated Press is reporting that Bob Kunst, who made a name for himself in 1996 by ...

Last week, a group of kids at a Florida middle school tried to declare Thursday “Kick a Jew Day.” According to the Naples News, ten students at North Naples Middle School sent around an e-mail on Wednesday night telling classmates that if they saw someone Jewish, they should deliver a kick. The kids have all ...

Hannah Rosenthal, the former head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, will start work Monday as the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. The position was created by Congress in 2004. Rosenthal, the 58-year-old daughter of a rabbi who survived the Holocaust, is a former seminarian—in the 1970s, she dropped out ...

Earlier this week, Sarah Palin went on Nightline and told Barbara Walters that she disagreed with the Obama administration’s policy of pressuring Israel to freeze new construction in Jewish settlements on the West Bank, in part because “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” ...

The White House is expected to formally announce today the appointment of Hannah Rosenthal, the 58-year-old former head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and a member of J Street’s advisory council, as the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, an ambassador-at-large position that falls under State’s human-rights portfolio. The position, ...