“I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” is a 1932 pop standard by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. It was also the title of Wednesday night’s concert in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series—a night of music and commentary produced by the impresario Hal Willner and celebrating A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, David Lehman’s ...

Miep Gies, who with three others sheltered eight Dutch Jews from the Nazis in a secret annex to Otto Frank’s Amsterdam office during World War II, died Monday night at the age of 100. She was an employee of Frank’s business who helped protect the Frank family; another family, the van Pels; and her dentist, ...

Chelsea Clinton has snagged herself a nice Jewish boy. President Bill Clinton’s office announced today that Chelsea is engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Marc Mezvinsky. Clinton is a former McKinsey consultant now studying public health at Columbia University; Mezvinsky is a fomer Goldman Sachs banker now at a hedge fund. The couple sent an email ...

The oldest surviving complete Torah scroll from pre-Inquisition Spain was sold at Sotheby’s yesterday to an unnamed American private collector for $398,500—not quite the half-million bucks the auction house gave as the high estimate, but impressive nonetheless. The 700-year-old scroll was put up for sale by Rabbi Yitzchok Reisman, a Torah scribe and repairman on ...

Excuse us while we kvell for a moment: Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine’s book critic, has been named to this year’s Forward 50, the newspaper’s annual list of the most important American Jewish leaders. Here’s what the Forward had to say:
This year Adam Kirsch, 33, has cemented his position as this century’s first pre-eminent Jewish man ...

• Couldn’t afford Bernie Madoff’s Montauk spread? Now his cheaper tchotchkes are up for auction. [Gawker]
• Jewish basketball star Nancy Lieberman becomes NBA’s first female head coach. (And, no that’s not an Onion headline.) [JChronicle]
• Jews continue to wander, now in obvious ways: As U.S. population has shifted south and west, so has Jewish population, ...

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who announced last week that he won’t be a candidate for another term in the election he has called for January, is likely to resign his office in the next month or so, Ethan Bronner reports in today’s New York Times. In last week’s reports, Bronner’s sources suggested that while Abbas ...

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced today that he won’t seek a new term in the president election he has called for January. “This is not a bargain or maneuver,” he said, although it’s unlikely the election will actually be held in January—they won’t happen until there’s a political reconciliation between Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah party, ...

Ilan Hall, the Long Island-born Jewish chef who won season two of Bravo’s Top Chef, a serving bacon-wrapped matzo balls at his just-opened Los Angeles restaurant, The Gorbals. That’s really about all there is to say on the matter, though the Los Angeles Jewish Journal has another 1,000 words on it—plus a video!—if you’re desperate ...