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Jews fit to print

By Uriel Heilman · April 17, 2009

David Brooks encounters Israeli chutzpah and realizes the national mission is not to be a frier.

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Jews fit to print: Can reporting on Israel in the NYT be fair?

By Uriel Heilman · January 26, 2009

Ethan Bronner on objections to his Israel/Gaza reporting. Samantha Shapiro on online Egyptian opposition. And more…

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Jews fit to print

By Uriel Heilman · December 8, 2008

From a profile of an eclectic, peace-loving West Bank rabbi to an examination of the Jewish ancestry of Spanish Catholics, The New York Times had a bevy of Jewish-related stories over the last few days:

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Jewish prophet of financial doom

By Ben Harris · September 16, 2008

Apropos of the scary acrobatics of the market this week, Netxbook has a fascinating piece about Hyman Minsky, the Russian Jew whose views on the efficiency of capital markets have suddenly become popular (see here, here, here and here).

Mark Cohen writes:

According to economist Paul Samuelson, ninety-five percent of economists believe that the capital market is rational and efficient; Minsky fell in the other five percent. He did not believe that modern financial capital markets were stable and, perhaps more significantly, did not even believe they could be made stable. It was an insight that may have more to do with his Jewish upbringing than most people realize.

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Jews fit to print

By Uriel Heilman · August 11, 2008

The New York Times had a number of interesting Jewish-related stories in recent days:

• Jennifer Bleyer reports from the front line of the American Orthodox Jewish dating scene: Manhattan’s Upper West Side – or, more specifically, the Westmont building on 96th and Columbus.
• Jake Mooney reports from the Sephardic Jewish enclave of Gravesend, Brooklyn, where a difference of just a block or two can make for significant fluctuation in real estate values.
• After four years in an Iranian jail, an Iranian-born American Jewish octogenarian who was lured back to Tehran four years ago by former business partners only to be arrested, lashed and imprisoned, is coming home.
• Three of the elder statesmen of comic books have joined forces to help Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who survived two years at Auschwitz by painting watercolor portraits for Mengele, get her artwork back from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, which refuses to return it. Babbitt is now 85 and living in California.
• Andrew Martin visits Israel’s Negev Desert and Golan Heights to report on how Israel is trying to cope with a four-year drought that the country’s agriculture minister is calling a “deep water crisis.” Israel’s growing population, rising incomes and falling rainfall have combined to produce the crisis, which has prompted farmers like Roni Kedar to rip the apples off his trees and leave them to rot.

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Jews fit to print

By Uriel Heilman · July 28, 2008

Several Jewish-related items appeared over the weekend in The New York Times:

• Former workers at Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meat plant, detailed alleged abuses at the Postville, Iowa plant. Sunday saw competing rallies between activists protesting working conditions at the plant and activists opposed to illegal immigration.
• Gaza is getting its first museum of archeology.
  
• Who’s the Israeli media powerhouse “everyone and nobody knows,” Vivi Nevo?
• Tom Friedman picks up on the undercurrent reported in two recent JTA pieces (here and here) and gushes about Israel’s electric car.
• An Orthodox Jewish couple from Brooklyn prepare to shutter a clothing store on 43rd St. and Fifth Ave., Judy’s Better Dresses, that is more Lower East Side than the fixture it has been for 40-plus years in Midtown Manhattan.

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Jews fit to print: Food shortages in North Africa and the Middle East, Tel Aviv is for you

By Ami Eden · July 21, 2008

The latest in Jews-related news from the NYT:

• Global food shortages have placed the Middle East and North Africa in a quandary, as they are forced to choose between growing more crops to feed an expanding population or preserving their already scant supply of water.
• Israel’s outgoing U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, does the Q & A in the Sunday magazine.
• A profile of the woman leading the effort to bring faith to the Democratic Party.
• Simcha Felder one of three Dems fighting for Brooklyn state senate seat.


• The NY Times reports on the ongoing feud between an Orthodox synagogue and a lingerie shop situated side-by-side on the Venice Beach boardwalk.
• The Travel section: You and Tel Aviv, perfect together.
• On the Weddings/Celebrations page: a Jewish gay couple in Los Angeles ties the knot.
• Is the new Botox kosher?

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Jews Fit to Print: The last Jews of Baghdad

By Ami Eden · June 2, 2008

The New York Times has had several items of interest over the past few days:

• The last Jews of Baghdad have become the fearful few.
• P. W. Singer and Elina Noor argue that the U.S. is making a strategic mistake by describing terrorists as jihadists.
• Organizers of the Salute to Israel Parade wonder why Israelis never seem to turn out.
• Thomas Friedman says Mr. Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America.
• A look a The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, that is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.
• The U.S. State Dept. reinstated seven Fullbright scholarships awarded to Palestinian students after it had withdrawn them last week citing Israel’s refusal to allow the students to leave the Gaza Strip.
• The public editor of the New York Times discusses how the paper was taken to task over an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Islamic world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that the candidate had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult. (Click here and here for response in the blogosphere).

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