Up-Front | In the Beginning

From Pundit To Pulpit?

Hank Sheinkopf: Prominent New York political consultant has earned rabbinical ordination in Israel.
09/20/2011
Adam Dickter

For 30 years, Hank Sheinkopf has been offering his advice to candidates and his analysis of the political landscape to the media. Now, he’s also fielding questions about halacha and offering comfort to the spiritually afflicted — as a newly ordained Orthodox rabbi.

Sheinkopf was granted smicha on July 5 from Rabbi Yitzchak Yehuda Yaroslavsky of Kfar Chabad, the Lubavitch enclave in Israel. Since the rabbi speaks no English, Sheinkopf completed his exam in Hebrew, which he has been studying at home on the Upper West Side.

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Iran And Syria’s ‘Wedding’

In street theater performance, actors portraying Syria’s Bashir Assad, left, and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “married” this week
09/20/2011
Stewart Ain

It gives new meaning to the Axis of Evil.

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France’s Honorable Agent

Literary agent Georges Borchardt, center, at Legion of Honor ceremony. Left Antonin Baudry; Right former French Culture Minister
10/26/2010
Caroline Lagnado

Before Georges Borchardt could become a New York literary agent, he had to become a New Yorker. And learn English.

Though he now represents Elie Wiesel and Ian McEwan as well as the estates of Hannah Arendt and Samuel Beckett, Borchardt was born in Berlin in 1928 and spent his childhood in Paris. His mother was killed in Auschwitz, and many other family members died in concentration camps. To survive, Borchardt went into hiding at a school in Aix-en-Provence, while his sisters worked at an American field hospital there.

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