The Vatican has branded as "criminal" the publication this weekend of confidential papal documents exposing the internal power struggles surrounding possible corruption and mismanagement involving international money laundering, the Associated Press reported.
Already dubbed "Vatileaks," the scandal had been brewing for months and was further inflamed with Saturday's publication of "His Holiness," a book by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, that included a trove of Pope Benedict XVI's correspondence.
It seems that Syrian President Bashar Assad and his enemies have finally found something they can agree on: Both blame Israel for their problems and accuse it of aiding the other side.
Assad has long said the uprising against his brutal regime has been instigated by foreign forces, saboteurs and a long list of enemies topped by the Zionists.
God is surely well-accustomed to all those vows from Lotto players, gamblers and risk-taking Wall Street investors about how much they’d give to charity if they hit paydirt. Even more than the Bucket List of things to do before we die, most people who aren’t wealthy have their own list of charities and worthy causes they would love to be able to bankroll before splurging on fast cars, big houses, exotic vacation and, for some, maybe settling their overdue day school tuition balance.
Hofesh Shechter often gets annoyed when people only see Jewish or Israeli references in his choreography. “It’s a very interesting, conflicted way the world sees Jews,” he told me a while back. “People [in England] refer to me as Jewish rather than Israeli. There’s this pigeonhole, this file that says ‘Jewish’ on it.”
In Jewish tradition, we think of an Ayshet Chayil, or woman of valor, as a wife:
A woman of valor who can find?
She is more precious than rubies.
The heart of her husband trusts in her,
And because of her he lacks nothing.
I want to make a pitch today to expand our definition to include daughters in tribute to the heroism of Cate Upham, 30, daughter of disgraced politician John Edwards. (She married in 2011.)
The latest artistic news about Poland’s small-but-emerging Jewish community centers around Pawel Bramson, a skinhead-turned-Orthodox-Jew who’s featured in a new documentary, “The Moon is Jewish,” which premiered here this winter, won an award at last month’s Jewish Motifs International Film Festival in Warsaw, and subsequently has garnered heavy coverage,
“From neo-Nazi skinhead to black-hatted Jew,” was the headline in JTA this week. And this on worldjewishdaily.com: “From Malicious to Mashgiach.”
In response to a changing attitude toward Israel on college campuses, the Israel advocacy group StandWithUs lauched in 2001. Its goal was to serve as an informational guerrilla unit of sorts and work with established campus organizations like Hillel to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda. With calls for universities to divest from Israeli companies still occurring on campuses across North America, StandWithUs has found itself growing in recent years and working harder to reach more college students.
