Short Takes

Mitt Romney, Your Bubbe

10/23/2012 | Helen Chernikoff

Big Bird. Binders. “A bunch of stuff.” Another Internet meme has joined the slew spawned by the election. But this time, unlike the Irish “malarkey,” it’s got a Jewish ethnic angle.

Mitt Romney used the word “tumult” several times in Monday night’s debate to refer to the results of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East, appropriately stirring up a storm of discussion online and in traditional media.

Wiesel And Hanks: New Fast Friends

10/23/2012 | Gary Rosenblatt

Few would put the names Elie Wiesel, Tom Hanks and Sting in the same sentence, much less the men themselves in the same room.

But there they were last week in the majestic Celeste Bartos Forum of the New York Public Library where The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity honored the Hollywood actor, producer and humanitarian with its inaugural Arts for Humanity Award, and the famed British musician performed for his celebrity friend

Rabbi To Sarah Silverman: Get Married Already

10/16/2012 | Stewart Ain

The comedian Sarah Silverman drew chuckles four years ago with her video urging young Jews to convince their grandparents in Florida to vote for Barack Obama. But a Dallas rabbi is not laughing about her latest pro-Obama video.

In an open letter to Silverman that has generated a firestorm of criticism on the Internet, Rabbi Yaakov Rosenblatt, who is Orthodox, gives Silverman a verbal whip lashing for her video, “Let My People Vote.”

From PJ To Posters

10/16/2012 | Steve Lipman

As soon as next week, a staff meeting at the Shorefront Y in Brighton Beach will begin with a dozen employees of the Brooklyn facility looking at a few posters.

God’s Favorite Ballplayer

10/10/2012 | Staff Report

“I f God had to choose His favorite baseball player of all time, who would He pick? Babe Ruth? Ted Williams? Sandy Koufax?”

That was the question Rabbi Beni Krohn, the assistant rabbi at Rinat Yisrael, a Modern Orthodox congregation in Teaneck, N.J., posed to his congregants at the outset of a sermon during the Sukkot holiday.

Sukkah City, The Movie

10/10/2012 | Helen Chernikoff

For a ritual structure intended to evoke fragility and transience, the sukkah enjoys an oddly long life as an object of contemplation and representation.

Two years ago, it was Sukkah City, an architecture competition and public art project in Union Square. It drew an estimated 200,000 viewers to the dozen winning, legally valid but visually untraditional temporary booths built to celebrate the holiday of Sukkot, which ended earlier this week.