More in ‘the Forward’

The glass ceiling, regrettably intact at philanthropic institutions across the country, is even harder to break for women at Jewish organizations. That’s according to an alarming story in the Forward, which reports that while three-quarters of the workforce at 75 major Jewish social service agencies, educational and religious institutions, and federations are women, women hold ...

In the new Forward, Jay Michaelson confronts the increasingly ubiquitous notion that spirituality and religion are essentially separate. “I, too, have often claimed that spiritual practice is distinguished from religion by its pragmatic focus—what a practice does—rather than its significance in a system of myth or dogma,” he grants, but he’s not content to leave ...

Among the dwindling ranks of Yiddishists, Isaac Bashevis Singer is not the superstar your Hebrew School teacher would have had you believe. “I. B. Singer wasn’t half as good a writer as I. J. Singer—I. B.’s older brother, Israel Joshua—who had died in 1944,” the experts kvetch, according to a 2004 New Yorker article by ...

The Forward lets cartoonist Eli Valley get away with a lot in his monthly comic, but the paper’s editor killed his latest contribution, which Gawker instead published yesterday afternoon. It’s got a lot of chutzpah: in its universe, Israelis are portrayed as chimpanzees whose lexicons are limited to “voonga!” and who pick fights with neighboring ...

Harvey Milk, the San Francisco gay-rights activist slain in 1978 by a fellow city Supervisor—and, of course, played by Sean Penn in last year’s Milk—will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His nephew will accept the honor at the White House on August 12 along with Sen. Ted Kennedy, Sidney Poitier, and other luminaries. Milk ...

In his long lifetime, James von Brunn—the 88-year-old who earlier this month allegedly shot and killed United States Holocaust Memorial Museum guard Stephen Johns—managed to embody every cliché about the Holocaust-denying anti-Semite: seething with hatred toward Jews, convinced that somehow they rig the money system, certain that there are multiple world-wide conspiracies afoot. And if ...

Jewish philanthropies have been cutting back and laying off staff in response to the economic bust and Bernie Madoff’s graft. But executives of those philanthropies have barely seen dents in their six-figure salaries, according to a report by Anthony Weiss in today’s Forward. Bigshots’ salary cuts ranged from none at all to a whopping 10 ...

At age thirteen, it never occurred to me that there was anything particularly striking about my bat mitzvah. Growing up in the secular humanist mecca of Cambridge, Massachusetts, I had little by way of comparison. But with nearly two decades of hindsight, it’s obvious that mine was not your typical Jewish American rite of passage. ...

When Jacob Gordin first arrived in America in 1891, he had no intention of writing for the Yiddish stage. The plays by Chekhov and Ibsen that had inspired the playwright in Russia had little in common with the melodramatic and vaudevillian charades that dominated popular productions on the Lower East Side.
Gordin was won over, however, ...