We’re not sure how we missed this headline in the Jerusalem Post last week, because it’s really an excellent one: “Chabad: Make Nazi Commander a ‘Righteous Gentile.’” Yep, it appears that the Nazis’ intelligence chief—Admiral Wilhelm Canaris—was instrumental in helping Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, escape from the Warsaw Ghetto along with ...

It’s no secret that Natalie Portman, a half-Israeli Long Island girl turned Harvard grad, has long been a favorite crush-slash-fetish object of dorky, smart, devoutly secular boys, the real-world antecedents of Zach Braff’s Garden State smitten doofus. But now she seems poised to perhaps serve the same role for those boys’ more observant bretheren. The ...

We missed this on Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic blog last week, but Tablet Magazine contributor and Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg pointed us to it yesterday. Sullivan, best known as the gay, Palin-hating, Obama-supporting, former-New Republic-editing, British conservative, considers himself a Zionist, and responding to Patrick Healy’s article on the gay scene in Beirut in last ...

Mustachioed New York Times foreign-affairs guru Thomas Friedman trotted to one of his favorite corners of the globe for today’s column, a dispatch from the Palestinian capital of Ramallah, in the West Bank. From there, he recounts the findings of the U.N Development Program’s new Arab Human Development report, which contains all sorts of dispiriting, ...

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? All of the sudden, just like that, it’s erev Rosh Hashana, and you realize you forgot to pay the synagogue dues and therefore never got your tickets in the mail. The synagogue office is already closed for the holiday, so you can’t make a last-minute payment and pick up ...

The new issue of Fortune magazine carries a fascinating story on Dina Wein Reis, who amassed a not-so-small fortune—including a lushly renovated townhouse on New York’s Upper West Side, an impressive art collection, and vacation homes in Westhampton, Bal Harbor, and Jerusalem—by running a years-long, large-scale con. She’d trick marketing execs at major companies into ...

Last week brought the news that Guss’ Pickles, the stalwart Lower East side vinegared-cucumber emporium, would soon be relocating to Brooklyn. Which was bad enough. But now it gets even worse: As New York’s Daily News reported Friday, a 2007 legal settlement between Pat Fairhurst, who owns the Orchard Street store, and the father-son duo ...

Many years ago, when your blogger was about 13 years and 1 month old, your blogger’s grandmother, to mark the recent occasion of his bar mitzvah, took him to Israel. On that trip, he remembers, they visited the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, in Tel Aviv, and—a cultural critic even then—your blogger was unimpressed. The ...

We earlier in the week declared a moratorium on all things Brüno, partially because there’s really nothing Jewish about it and mostly because it’s sort of terrible. But we must temporarily lift that moratorium to appreciate the excellent work of the Forward’s art department, as demonstrated by the placement of teaser art on the new ...

It is, in truth, an excellent question, when you stop to think about it. If a blind man “sees” what people look like by touching their faces, how is a blind Orthodox man—prohibited from touching a woman who is not his wife—to see what a potential wife looks like? Thankfully, Rabbi Yuval Sherlo, head of ...