Columbus

The Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan will move this fall to new, larger facilities at 100th Street and Columbus Avenue. The 15,000-square-foot campus will bring the entire K-8 school under one roof in a location as first-rate as Schechter’s education has been all along. The new space will cater to the growing population of Jewish families on the Upper West Side (“On Upper  West Side, A Jewish Youth Boom,” June 11).

According to Dava Schub, the Upper West Side of Manhattan “is a neighborhood full of baby carriages, dogs, families of two and three and five.”

Schub should know: as associate executive director for programming at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, she sees 2,000 locals of all ages stream daily in and out of the building at Amsterdam Avenue and 76th Street.

Several years ago, when Philip Roth's novel "Portnoy's Complaint" turned 25, I spent a few days in the New York Public Library researching the Jewish community's reaction to the book. I discovered that the response to it (as well as to the stories in "Goodbye, Columbus," which appeared a few years earlier) was a combination of rage and puzzlement. The level of shock and hurt expressed by community leaders was less surprising to me, though, than the unanimity of response.

Moshe and Adina Tyberg, Flatbush residents in their mid-30s, are living in a two-bedroom apartment with five young children.

“As you can imagine,” the father says, the atmosphere “isn’t very conducive to raising kids,” but he and his wife are unable to afford a larger home in Brooklyn. As a result, both Moshe, a human-resources professional, and Adina, an occupational therapist, are ready to move beyond the New York area, where they hope to find a better quality of life.

While millions of Americans spent their Columbus Day weekend home from work or scoping out one-day sales, more than 100 young Jews trekked down to South Florida, where they scouted out not only their own grandparents, but also hordes of Bubbe and Zeyde’s closest friends.

If Sen. Barack Obama doesn’t win next month’s presidential election, Comedy Central’s foul-mouthed Sarah Silverman thinks she knows whom to blame. And she’s not going to be happy.

Want to create an instant community? Just add cotton. That's what one San Francisco-based entrepreneur says she's doing with a line of T-shirts silk-screened with the slogans "Yo Semite" (a play on the national park's name) and "Jews for Jeter": in support of the Yankees' star shortstop.

Undeniably clever, the shirts ($15 to $20) are "no joke" to their designer, Sarah Lepton, 30.

One of the guests of honor at the recent commencement exercises of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, sitting at the far left of the first row of the sanctuary in Temple Emanu-El, was neither guest speaker, college official Nor financial supporter of the institution.

Dalia Samansky, a third-year rabbinical student at the school’s Los Angeles campus who received her master’s degree in L.A. the following week, was invited to the New York commencement as role model.

She had saved a life.

Several Ohio Jewish organizations joined together this week to launch a pro-Israel campaign at Ohio State University a week before the start of a three-day national pro-Palestinian student conference.
A coalition including Chabad, OSU's Hillel, the Columbus Jewish Federation, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish National Fund was planning the Israel Activism on Campus campaign Tuesday featuring noted attorney Alan Dershowitz, author of the new book "The Case for Israel."

As Pakistan’s prime minister in the mid-1990s, Benazir Bhutto sponsored the fundamentalist Taliban insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan — thereby bringing to power the force that would shelter and defend Osama bin Laden.
Bhutto also unstintingly backed Pakistan’s covert nuclear weapons program as a response to the program of arch-rival India, including her country’s decision, while she was opposition leader, to conduct Pakistan’s first nuclear bomb tests in 1998, bringing to fruition the world’s first "Islamic bomb."