Neil Rubin, editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times, reports on the appearance of Arnie Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, at the annual convention of Conservative rabbis — and offers plenty of his own advice: (more…)

Ha’aretz argues in an editorial Thursday that “restraint can no longer be seen as strength” when dealing with the continued Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel in the south. (more…)

The celebrity gossip Web site TMZ has a video segment on the latest wave of Jews to invade Hollywood: Israeli commandos.

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Reuters reports that a photograph of the boy with the “beautiful brown eyes” who Anne Frank described as her “one true love” is set to go on display in Amsterdam.

The photo of Peter Schiff was donated to the Anne Frank museum by his former childhood friend Ernst Michaelis who realized after rereading Anne’s diary recently there were no known pictures of Schiff, a museum spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

In her famous diary, Frank wrote: “I forgot that I haven’t yet told you the story of my one true love.”

“Peter was the ideal boy: tall, slim and good-looking, with a serious, quiet and intelligent face,” Anne wrote of the 13-year-old she had fallen for in 1940 when she was just 11.

To see the photo, click here.

Anshel Pfeffer has a story in Ha’aretz about Pinchads Zlotosvsky, 32, a Polish skinhead who became a fervently Orthodox Jew after learning of his Jewish roots.

The transition in Zlotosvsky’s life occurred after his mother told him she comes from a Jewish family. Her parents, she said, sent her to a monastery when she was a small child so that she would survive the Holocaust.

All her relatives were murdered, as far as Pinchas Zlotosvsky knows.

“I realized I was Jewish according to Judaism. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror for a whole week after I found out,” he recalls. After he recovered from the shock, he spent the past few years rediscovering his Jewish roots. He has also become very active with the Jewish community.

Ha’aretz caught up with Zlotosvsky at an annual conference for hidden Jews in Lodz. The newspaper reports that official figures put the number of Jews living in Poland at 4,000 — but the number of people who are Jewish according to Halacha.

The discrepancy stems from the fact that thousands of Jews who survived the war preferred not to reveal their Jewish identity for fear of anti-Semitic persecution by the local population. … Another significant portion of the hidden Jewish population consists of people like Pinchas Zlotosvsky’s mother, whose parents sent them to monasteries to be raised as Christians. Despite efforts by international Jewish organizations to locate these people, not all have been found, and many are assumed to have remained Christian.

JTA’s Tom Tugend discusses reaction to the loss of the Israeli film “Beaufort” in the Foreign Film Oscar category and continued Jewish dominance of Hollywood.

To subscribe to JTA’s Behind the News podcast, click here.

Okay, it’s true that I haven’t seen any of this year’s nominees for best foreign-language film. Maybe “The Counterfeiters” was the best of the bunch.

Still, on principle, it bugs me: Israel finally has a great chance to win its first Oscar (for “Beaufort”) — and loses to an Austrian picture about the Holocaust!?! To add insult to injury, it was written and directed by director-writer Stefan Ruzowitzky, a descendant of Nazis and/or Nazi sympathizers.

Yes, Ruzowitzky, was quite gracious in victory, paying homage to the Jewish directors who were exiled from his native land prior to World War II. But the bottom line is there should be a rule against Israeli films losing to Holocaust-themed movies made in countries that sided with the Nazis.

And don’t get me started on Leni Riefenstahl.

Frank Bruni triggered quite a debate with his blog post about whether the Second Avenue Deli should be considered kosher since it is open on Shabbos.

“What say those readers who know more of matters kosher than I do?” Bruni asked.

We’ll leave that debate to the more knowledgeable and passionate posters to Bruni’s blog entry. But we would like to humbly suggest to the esteemed NYT food critic that the real shandah came this week, in his review of Dovetail, an Upper West Side eatery that most readers would agree is probably not kosher.

This passage of the review would seem to remove any doubt:

There’s an appetizer that combines two of the most fashionable ingredients in upscale restaurants these days, seared pork belly and a slowly poached egg, and as soon as you taste them together, you smile at what’s afoot. It’s breakfast for dinner, only at breakfast the belly is smoked and called bacon.

In one of the entrees, curls and chunks of lobster are scattered around monkfish, reminding you that this fish has often been cast as the poor man’s lobster, vaguely similar in texture but not nearly as sweet.

But, now, check out the photo that ran with the review:

Give the guy on the right with the yarmulke a break — he probably just ordered the apple.

In his column this week, the editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, Andrew Silow-Carroll, reflects on his decision to run an article about Dinnersmith, a new community kitchen in Maplewood, N.J., that “isn’t kosher” but accommodates those who “keep a lenient form of kashrut.”

How does a Jewish newspaper write about an establishment that is clearly nonkosher but goes out of its way to cater to a crowd that keeps a personal form of kashrut out of the home? More to the point, how does it write about it without really ticking off rabbinic authorities who demand that clear lines be drawn between what is certified kosher (that is, carries a hechsher from the local rabbinical council or national agency) and what isn’t?

Lets return to the Dinnersmith dilemma. Plenty of Jews go to nonkosher restaurants but observe what some call “kosher lite” — ranging from no pork or shellfish, to no meat or fowl, to eating cold foods only. Many of them keep kosher homes. (They’re the ones who never ask for doggie bags.)

By the Orthodox rabbis and many Conservative rabbis (but not all, as we’ll see) kosher lite is like being a little bit pregnant — or not pregnant, if you want to be technical, and if you care at all about kashrut, of course you do.

Silow-Carroll asserts that the deeper debate is between “Authority and Autonomy, the milk and meat of modernity.” (more…)