Новости за 19.05.2016

What’s better than one Adam Sandler? Now that I’ve asked this question, and realize there are plenty of smart-aleck responses to it, let me just answer it for you. What’s better than one Adam Sandler are two Adam Sandlers!

Like many other graduates of Jewish day schools, I was sent off to college by my high school’s administration with an unopened copy of Mitchell Bard’s Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. I would become an unofficial spokesperson for Judaism and for Israel on campus, I was told, and any questions I had could and would be answered in its 384 pages. Armed with this book, I prepared to enter the murky, hotbed of political activism that exists at Columbia University.

On Tuesday the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau announced in a statement that its staff had found a mug with a double bottom; in it, they said, was “a women’s ring made of gold and a necklace wrapped in a piece of canvas.” Remarkably, this mug is one of more than 12,000 pieces of enameled kitchenware at the museum.

On Thursday, June 3, 1976, Henry Roth, the author of Call It Sleep, took his audio recorder and drove from the trailer park court where he lived with Muriel, his wife, eight miles to the house of Rose and Louis Hiat, in the Highland section of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the Bicentennial summer, and Roth was feeling good, even though chronic arthritis would necessitate a hip replacement in the coming years. Recently, he’d begun a regimen of cod liver oil and lecithin to relieve the itching of skin psoriasis... Читать дальше...

This week, Unorthodox goes back to high school. This episode was recorded live from the American Hebrew Academy, in Greensboro, North Carolina: the world’s only international Jewish college prep boarding school.

Last week, the British Labour party suspended Musabbir Ali, a former campaign official, for making anti-Semitic statements on social media. He joined an ignominious cast of characters punished for similar offenses, including a former mayor of London and a current parliament member. But Ali distinguished himself with his particularly creative brand of anti-Semitism.

One of Israel’s most notorious alleged Jewish extremists will be released from administrative detention on June 1. Meir Ettinger, who Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service believed to be a leading organizer of anti-Arab violence among West Bank settlers, had been held without charge for eight months. Ettinger’s arrest in July 2015 came the day after the deadly arson attack in the West Bank village of Douma that killed three members of a single family, including an infant. Two Jewish extremists have been formally charged for that crime. Читать дальше...

On Monday, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell handed down a 106-page ruling in a lawsuit between Congregation Jeshuat Israel, which prays at Touro Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in the U.S. in Newport, Rhode Island, and Shearith Israel, the oldest congregation in America and Touro’s trustee. The judge’s decision, writes Bloomberg’s Noah Feldman, “emphasizes the future over the past, refusing to treat Jewish spaces and objects as relics and instead making them into investments in the future.”