After finishing a long workday and needing some down time from the intensity of the last few days, I headed to a friend’s to relax and celebrate. Not long after I arrived, my friend and his roommate were reliving an experience earlier that day where...
Last week, the world learned of the deaths by suicide of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, legends in their respective fields. Fans, friends and family all find themselves wondering why; they were both successful and seemed happy. News outlets and social...
Questions about freedom of speech and freedom of religion in the United States rarely have easy answers. Battles over the meaning of “religious freedom” define what forms of speech and religious expression are constitutionally protected. Can an individual...
BY ROBERT A. COHN, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus
• Published June 14, 2018
Israelis are sensitive about references to the Holocaust as a basis for the international recognition of a Jewish State at the United Nations in 1947. But one cannot doubt the relationship between the period before and during the Holocaust when Jews were...
(JTA) — In an essay for JTA on Michael Chabon’s intermarriage views, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer describe a “left camp” that argues for greater acceptance, welcoming and inclusion of the intermarried and their family...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Supreme Court’s much-anticipated decision in the case of the Colorado baker who was penalized because he refused, on religious grounds, to create a cake for a same-gender wedding ceremony must have disappointed both sides.The...
NEW YORK (JTA) — Anthony Bourdain was quick – and often willing – to publicly offer his own flaws.“Until 44 years of age, I never had any kind of savings account,” Bourdain said in 2017. “[I] always owed money. I’d always been selfish and...
Counterpoint to commentary Henry Schvey’s May 30 commentary, “Trump ends role as honest Mideast mediator,” is completely ridiculous and totally biased.First of all, I truly do sympathize with the loss of so many human lives; even if the latter...
The mortar attacks and cross-border infiltrations from Gaza should serve as a reminder that Hamas may be in charge of the Gaza Strip, but it has a junior partner that is dangerous and capricious, and that it refuses to disarm: Islamic Jihad.There is a...
I’ve been wrong about Donald Trump a lot.I totally dismissed him, for example, when he announced on June 16, 2015, that he was running for president.During the decade I lived and worked in New York, Trump was just a press-manipulating, bogus mogul of...
BY ROBERT A. COHN, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus
• Published May 31, 2018
“At any event, all I can do with my story is tell it. And tell it and tell it.” —Philip Roth in “My Life as a Man”Acclaimed Jewish writer Philip Roth’s recent passing hit me like a death in the family. Like many American Jewish males of...
ROBERT A. COHN, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus
• Published May 31, 2018
“Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin? He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good die young. But I just look around and he’s gone.” — Lyric from “Abraham, Martin and John,” by Dion DiMucci
It is hard to believe that...
