JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

The day the temple was bombed

By Uriel Heilman · October 13, 2008

Blacks and Jews in Atlanta marked the 50th anniversary of the bombing of The Temple on Peachtree Street – the first Civil Rights-era attack in Atlanta. The synagogue was targeted because its rabbi, Jacob Rothschild, was an outspoken proponent of civil rights. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a story on the bombing’s commemoration.

0 Comments | Share This | community, History

Edgar Bronfman on money, the Jews’ God and Sarah Palin

By Uriel Heilman · October 7, 2008

In a Q & A in the New York Times Magazine, Jewish billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman, Sr., the former Seagram chairman, talks about why the Jewish community should welcome interfaith marriages, why he gives his money to Jewish causes even though he doesn’t believe in the God of the Old Testament and why he’d vote for Mickey Mouse before voting for a McCain-Palin ticket.

My favorite exchange in this piece:

Did you lose a lot of money in the Wall Street meltdown last month? I don’t know. I don’t watch it on a day-to-day basis.

Do you get upset when you lose large sums of money overnight? I get over it very quickly.

You don’t get ulcers? My father put it right when he said: I don’t get ulcers. I give ulcers.

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Shomrim vs. Shmira (and the NYPD)

By Uriel Heilman · September 23, 2008

The NYPD is trying to bring two rival Jewish security patrols in Brooklyn, the Shomrim and Shmira, under one roof, the New York Post reports:

The NYPD is trying to settle a long-running dispute between two rival Orthodox Jewish patrol groups - and keep them from taking the law into their own hands - by uniting them into one police-supervised unit, The Post has learned.

The challenge is getting them to cooperate.

Shmira and Shomrim, private crime-patrol organizations in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, have been rivals since the late ‘90s, when they split.

Shmira has agreed to the merger, which was proposed in June. Shomrim has refused.

1 Comment | Share This | community, Crime, Mishegaas, Orthodox

The Bobovers’ pub

By Uriel Heilman · September 15, 2008

Regular drinkers in London’s East End have their knickers all in a bunch over the possible sale of a historic local watering hole, the 250-year-old Swan, to a group of Bobover Chasidim who plan to turn it into a shul, the U.K. Evening Standard reports.

The pub’s landlady said the prospect of the pub’s closure would hit the elderly (!) especially hard.

Ellen McLean, the landlady for seven years, said: “People are aggravated. It’s hard for some, especially the elderly customers who have been coming here for years. It’s all very sad.”

The pub’s owners, Punch Taverns, who run more than 8,000 other establishments, confirmed they had received an offer to buy The Swan.

“No deal has been completed, and we are listening to the concerns regarding the closure of the pub,” a spokesman said.

Solomon Goldman, from the Bobov community, said: “We are willing to negotiate.”

Maybe Goldman can invite the pub crawlers for a little l’chaim?

0 Comments | Share This | community, haredim, Interfaith

Y.U. wrestles with transgender prof

By Ben Harris · September 8, 2008

I thought I had quite a scoop last week with news that a Y.U. professor was apparently pushed out of his post because of his blog. But leave it to the New York Post to go one better. The Post had quite a shocker today when it reported that Professor Jay Ladin was returning to school for the fall semester as a woman.

Ladin, now known as Joy, was placed on leave when he informed the school of his intention to change his gender. After some wrangling, the university decided to allow her to return.

Rabbis are up in arms, but the transgendered community is apparently celebrating. “I think it’s fabulous and wonderful,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

4 Comments | Share This | community, LGBT

An Israeli’s superiority complex

By Uriel Heilman · August 15, 2008

When American-born Israeli journalist Judy Siegel-Itzkovich returns to the U.S. for the first time in 26 years, she finds much to disparage – from the materialism to the assimilation to the supposed hypocrisy of American Zionism.

She notes that the American Jewish population is shrinking, while Israel’s is growing; she writes of her former neighborhood emptying of moderate Orthodox Zionists and becoming haredi; she finds much to scoff at in the Westchester suburbs of New York, with their gas-guzzling SUVs, Jewish parents who don’t send their kids to Jewish day schools and assimilation.

She writes in The Jerusalem Post:

US Jews have enjoyed a magnificent century of surging wealth, political and cultural influence and primacy in scientific research, medicine, the media and many other professional fields. But I fear they have passed their peak and entered an irreversible decline. If Hadassah is struggling, what about the future of smaller and much less influential Jewish organizations?

Siegel-Itzkovich’s visit may have reinforced her Israeli superiority complex, but her analysis is selective. Post a comment and tell us why.

18 Comments | Share This | community, Israel, Zionism

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.

3 Comments | Share This | community, Culture, Jews Fit to Print, Media

Shidduch emergency crisis

By Uriel Heilman · July 11, 2008

Shidduch vetting in the Orthodox world has gotten out of control, writes Tamar Snyder in the Wall Street Journal:

Just as the economy is headed to recession, the shidduch system is in crisis mode. Or so the rabbis moan, noting the surplus of women eager to marry and the corresponding shortfall in the quality and quantity of available Jewish men. It’s not that there are more Orthodox women than men out there; experts instead attribute the shortage to the broader sociological trend of postponing marriage, which works to the disadvantage of women looking for spouses their own age or just a few years older. Men who are 30 will date women as young as 18 and may turn their noses up at dating any woman past the age of 25. The 20% or 30% of women who don’t get hitched right away begin to worry they’ll be left out in the cold for good.

3 Comments | Share This | community, Dating, Orthodox, Religion

Secular leader to perform gay marriages

By Ben Harris · June 12, 2008

At least one Jewish organization is psyched by the California Supreme Court ruling to allow same-sex marriages. The secular Sholem Community and its vegvayzer (that’s Yiddish for leader, apparently), Hershl Hartman, is planning to officiate for same-sex couples. The full release follows:

Los Angeles – With the California ban now lifted on gay marriages, The Sholem Community, a progressive, secular Jewish organization, is set to provide support to both Jewish and intercultural gay and lesbian couples who wish to marry.

The Sholem Community’s education director Hershl Hartman, a Secular Jewish Leader (madrikh in Hebrew, vegvayzer in Yiddish) who is certified to perform marriages, welcomed the Court’s ruling. “I am thrilled that the California Supreme Court acted in the interest of equality, justice, and humanity by extending a fundamental civil right,” said Hartman.

“Now that same-gender couples have the same marriage rights enjoyed by all adult couples, I look forward to the opportunity to officiate at gay and lesbian weddings with the full protection that the law provides,” he added.

As an inclusive organization, The Sholem Community has long welcomed LGBT individuals and families and has educated their children in its Sunday School as part of the century-long tradition of secular Jews in furthering the struggle for labor and civil rights. It wholeheartedly endorses the California Supreme Court’s decision holding that marriage is a “basic civil right of personal autonomy and liberty...to which all persons are entitled without regard to their sexual orientation.”

Other Secular Jewish Leaders in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego Counties, as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area, have been certified to perform all life-cycle ceremonies including weddings by the Leadership Conference of Secular and Humanistic Jews. They may be found at its website: http://www.lcshj.org

3 Comments | Share This | community, Religion

Sparkbliss.com

By Ami Eden · June 11, 2008

The Jewish Transcript in Seattle profiles Joel Blatt, a twice-married consultant who invented a new dating site with the goal of meeting a nice Jewish girl. Plus, click here to listen to Blatt’s interview with ABC News Radio.

Here’s the opening of the Transcript article:

Getting by — and dating — with a little help from your friends may have just gotten easier, thanks to a local entrepreneur’s spin on matchmaking.

In March, fed up with the online dating world, Joel Blatt created Sparkbliss.com, a Web site that he describes as “LinkedIn, for dating.”

Blatt, 42, who works for a Bellevue consulting firm, has been married twice — both times to non-Jewish women. While Sparkbliss is not specifically a Jewish dating site, Blatt said he did create it with the goal of meeting a Jewish woman.

“I’ve tried JDate, I’ve tried other online dating sites, and they don’t work very well,” Blatt said. “I couldn’t take anymore of those awful dates. I wanted to meet the right people.”

The trouble with most online dating sites, he contends, is simple: profiles can be viewed — and judged — based on search criteria entered by site users, but those profiles are not always true representations of the singles on the site. Blatt said that he wanted that possibility eliminated from the equation.

3 Comments | Share This | community, Dating