Eric Rudolph was arrested Saturday in western North Carolina after a five-year search by investigators. In total, he is believed to be responsible for four bombings, in which two people were killed and 150 people injured.
When Murray Mednick was an impoverished 14-year-old growing up in the Catskills, he took a series of busboy jobs at rundown hotels frequented by Holocaust survivors.
Why are we the People of the Book? Why aren\’t we the People of the Question?
After all, before Moses receives the Torah on Mt. Sinai, like Abraham earlier, he answers God\’s call to service with a question. In Exodus 3:11, he says, \”Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?\”
\nYMCA leaders in Los Angeles strongly denounced a report by an international YMCA affiliate in Geneva, which accuses Israel of using \”massive force against unarmed protesters and completely innocent people\” and urges that \”the YMCA take the side of the oppressed Palestinian people.\”
Talmudic sages wondered how King Achav of Israel could have reigned for decades, considering his practice and encouragement of idolatry and every type of sin. They arrived at the answer that at least during his reign there was, if nothing else, unity among the Jewish people. Today we find deep divisions among our people, perhaps nowhere more so than in our attitudes toward Israel and the peace process. It almost makes you wish for the good old days of King Achav.
Can one speak of a \”national character\”? Whileacknowledging that the practice has a pernicious side, Rabbi ArthurHertzberg, in his provocative, if mislabeled, new work, points outthat many books speak of national character and are readily acceptedand praised. For example, Luigi Barzini\’s book on the Italians,numerous modern works on the nature of the Russian people, or workson the character of the Greek or Roman peoples in antiquity all seemharmless exercises in interpreting the culture of another. While itis true that plumbing the \”Jewish character\” is an enterprise thathas been twisted by malevolence, particularly in the last century,that does not mean that certain traits cannot be said to distinguishthe Jewish people throughout their history.
Gangs of masked, Yiddish-speaking thugs in Brooklyn have been abducting Orthodox Jewish men and beating them savagely to force them into granting their wives a religious divorce,or get, according to several men who say they were victims of such assaults.The beatings allegedly were ordered by an Orthodox rabbinical court.\n
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