Hoping to ignite a new wave of immigration, Israel changed its tax laws nearly a year ago, offering potential new arrivals, as well as those who’d left the country but are considering a return, a big break. According to the new rules, newcomers would pay no taxes on any foreign income for 10 years following ...

In the Hasidic world, it’s traditional for men to spend their time studying Talmud at donor-supported institutions that provide them with a small stipend (not much more than $300 a month) while their wives take care of running the household. With the recession, donations have fallen off, leaving already large-families with even less income. Daniel ...

Earlier this year Ayelet Waldman extended her resume of confessional writings with the publication of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. Now her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, takes a whirl into the world of intimate revelation with Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of ...

Vanessa Redgrave is known of course for her acting but also for her criticism of Israel and her sympathetic stance toward Palestinians. So it’s surprising to see a letter she published in the October 22 issue of the New York Review of Books challenging those who protested the choice of Tel Aviv as the showcased ...

While Bernard Madoff’s colossal fraud leached vast sums from the country’s wealthiest Jews in the past year, not every one of them is destitute. Quite the opposite, if the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s assessment of Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans is to be trusted. According to their annotation—a questionable pursuit on account of the ...

Author Anita Diamant talked to CNN.com about her new novel, Day After Night, which tells the story of four women freed in 1945 from a detention camp in the town of Atlit, near Haifa, during British Mandate Palestine by members of the Palmach, the pre-state Jewish fighting force. While Diamant’s characters are fictional (they are ...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist William Safire, who died Sunday at 79, was a New York City-born college dropout-turned-public relations wizard who rose to prominence in 1959 when he organized the famous “kitchen debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Krushchev in Moscow. Nixon later hired Safire to work on his failed 1960 presidential ...

Conjecture about Jewishness in the cinematic oeuvre of Ethan and Joel Coen has chased them for nearly 20 years, since the 1990 release of Miller’s Crossing, reaching a memorable plateau in 1998’s The Big Lebowski, which featured John Goodman as a Vietnam vet and convert who refuses to drive on Shabbat. Religious buzz is growing ...

Opportunist (and rabbi) Shmuley Boteach today starts hawking The Michael Jackson Tapes, a new book based on 30 hours of conversations he had with the late pop star. Among its big revelations is Jackson’s admiration for Hitler, whom he called a “genius orator,” according to Britain’s Daily Mail. “To make that many people turn and ...

Ladbrokes, the famous British oddmakers, is favoring Amos Oz four-to-one for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. He’d be the second Israeli to win the prestigious award, after the first was S.Y. Agnon in 1966. Oz, the author of several acclaimed works including the 2004 memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, is joined on ...