Новости за 18.05.2016

I hadn’t slept for over 36 hours—the chance to give a handmade gift to President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, a dream come true, can do that to a person. In all actuality, I’d been restless for almost five months.

The chorus against North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom law“—which does away with important civil rights protections for LGBT people and forbids transgender persons from using bathrooms that do not match the gender identity stated on their birth certificates—is growing stronger.

The first time Barbra Streisand sang for an audience, she was still known as Barbara. It was July 2, 1960, and she had signed up to compete in a talent show at a Greenwich Village nightclub called the Lion. If Streisand’s life were a myth, this would be the scene in which she reveals herself as something more than human, a heroine or demigoddess capable of slaying monsters—or, in this case, the audience. She took the stage, Neal Gabler writes in his new book Barbra Streisand, in an oddball thrift-shop outfit... Читать дальше...

This is a sponsored post on behalf of Yale University Press and their Jewish Lives series.

On many a Sunday when I was a child, I accompanied my father not to baseball games but to funerals. A rabbi, he officiated at these deathly occasions near and far, but mostly in the Bronx.

In 1998, Rukhl Schaechter was working as a Yiddish teacher at a Jewish day school in Riverdale, in the Bronx, when she got a call from Boris Sandler, the new editor of The Yiddish Daily Forward, or Forverts. Mordechai Strigler, the editor of Forverts since 1987, had died suddenly of a heart attack and the paper wanted to hire Schaechter as a new reporter. “Boris said he was looking for frishe koykhes—fresh, young blood” said Schaecter, who comes from a family of Yiddishists.