A trumpeter playing sorrowful songs outside of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art seemed to symbolize the melancholy many of the proponents of the two-state solution of an independent Palestinian state next to Israel feel these days.
In the early 1940s, at a time when it was virtually impossible for a South African of color to secure a professional apprenticeship, the Jewish law firm Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman gave a young black man a job as a clerk.
Jewish organizations have expressed condolences over the passing of Nelson Mandela, the former South African president and anti-apartheid activist, saying that the world will miss a leader whose dedication to human rights resonated with Jewish values.
The year was 1994; South Africa was hanging on a thread. The first free general election was about to take place on April 27.
Nelson Mandela guided South Africa from the shackles of apartheid to multi-racial democracy, as an icon of peace and reconciliation who came to embody the struggle for justice around the world.
The Iranian nuclear issue and Palestinian peace talks may be dominating the news about Israel nowadays, but if discussions within the Jewish state focused on any social challenge this year, it was the question of how to integrate the Charedi Orthodox population into Israel’s workforce and military.
An incoming New York City councilwoman said the wave of so-called knockout attacks may be caused by tension between blacks and Jews.
There is nothing new under the sun,” Ecclesiastes tells us, but what about Los Angeles? In the city’s history, lost in the files of patents, oral histories and news stories, we find Jewish innovators — scientists and designers, who through their inventions, concoctions and designs have beamed lasers into our lives, fed the hungry and dressed us in both the latest and barest of fashion.
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