More in ‘The New York Times’

As the scandal surrounding New York Gov. David Paterson’s alleged intervention in a longtime aide’s assault case continues to mushroom, the New York Times—the same paper that broke the scandal—takes a good long look at Lieutenant Gov. Richard Ravitch. If Paterson resigns, Ravitch would become the first Jewish governor of America’s most Jewish state in ...

• We learn that two of the suspected (and allegedly Mossad) assassins of Hamas’s chief weapons man escaped to Iran after the killing. The Scroll will have more on the yet more bizarre mystery later in the day. [NYT]
• In public and private, the Obama administration tsk-tsked Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to landmark two Biblical ...

• Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system seems wonderful in theory, but it’s not perfect yet still costly, and is therefore stirring controversy. [LAT]
• Dubai has 15 new suspects in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, all of whom carried European or—in a new twist—Australian passports. The Scroll will have a full update later today. [Ynet]
• ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, David P. Goldman talks to George Friedman, whose defense consulting company Stratfor—a “private CIA”—predicts the rise of Poland as well as a Japanese-Turkish axis against America. Digging through old Yiddish newspapers, Eddy Portnoy finds that the pre-World War II Warsaw Beit Din frequently resembled less a staid rabbinical court and more ...

When you think back to good rabbis you’ve known (or to bad ones), you’re probably less likely to recall their command of the liturgy—they all know that— and more the personal touches they put on their dealings with you, whether at a family bar mitzvah or even a family funeral. They don’t teach that stuff ...

Earlier reports have been confirmed: the son of Ethan Bronner, who is the New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, has enlisted in the Israeli military. Times editor Bill Keller told the paper’s ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, that this was the case, and insisted there were no plans to remove Bronner from his post: “Ethan has proved ...

Has the son of Ethan Bronner—the New York Times’s current Israel beat reporter—enlisted in the Israeli military? (And, if so, would that constitute an unacceptable conflict of interest for Bronner?) An earlier report of this was subsequently retracted, but yesterday the blog Electronic Intifada seemed all but confirmed the news. The blog—which tends to be ...

On the day after Christmas, the New York Times published a sympathetic article on the emotional bind that many former Christians who have converted to Judaism find themselves in during December 25th:
For thousands of people who convert to Judaism, Christmas is a difficult day of balancing what was once intimately theirs but now represents, in ...

• Turns out the three alleged thieves who tried to steal the Auschwitz sign bungled the heist in a thoroughly comedic manner. [NYT]
• While the Palestinian residents of Yasuf, in the West Bank, appreciated Israeli condemnations of the arson against their mosque, what they really want is for the perpetrators (presumed to be Israeli settlers) ...

“The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” Philip Roth, in Operation Shylock, was referring to Berlin’s “Easter Parade” and, ...