The film “Defiance” told the story of the Bielski brothers, who led a group of partisans in fighting the Nazis and established a self-sustaining Jewish community in the forests of Belarus, but it didn’t show what is ultimately their greatest triumph.
When I finally spoke with Joseph Neustadt by phone, I told him how nice it had been to see him a few weeks ago in person.\n\n“We’ve never met,” he said.
Marty Kaplan once again goes where others fear to tread (“The Virtue of Hate,” April 10). His article makes us realize that hate is not a monolithic concept whose fire singes all those who come too close to its flame.
I learned something new at our seder this year, and it had nothing to do with the story of the Exodus.\n\nI was ready for a seder full of questions. I had done my homework, gone to classes, read essays and books. I prepared questions that I would ask the kids, questions that would encourage them to ask their own questions. Like my friend Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller impressed on us at one of our Torah salons, a seder is like a mini-Beit Midrash, a table of learning, debating and understanding.\n
After a week in Israel — my first visit there — my overall assessment of its state of the environment is that there is room for both optimism and pessimism. Israel’s environmental health depends on the country taking decisive steps, both large and small, to reverse decades of damage.
Anna Paquin was 11 when she won an Oscar for her performance in “The Piano” and in her mid-20s when she took the 2009 Golden Globe for her leading role in HBO’s vampire series, “True Blood,” but as she locked up her bicycle on a funky stretch of Abbot Kinney Boulevard the other day, she looked like just another young woman from the neighborhood. “Thanks for schlepping down to Venice,” she said as a greeting.
This month marks nine years since Holocaust denier David Irving lost his libel suit against historian and scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who chronicled her battle against him in the book, “History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving” (HarperCollins, 2005). Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, has just unveiled the translations of the popular “Myths & Facts” sheets, which help refute deniers with historical evidence, in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and Russian.
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