Gabrielle Birkner
By Gabrielle Birkner
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Life Ahmadinejad’s Speech Was Supposed To Be Even More Inflammatory
Here’s the portion of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Durban II speech that caused dozens of Western diplomats to walk out of a session yesterday at the U.N. racism conference: The U.N. has since said that Ahmadinejad’s address would have been even more inflammatory; he apparently left out a previously planned reference to Holocaust denial that…
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Culture ‘American Idol’ Frontrunner Pays Tribute to Rabin
Years before Adam Lambert, this season’s “American Idol” frontrunner, made Simon Cowell go weak at the knees, he sang Shir Lashalom alongside Noa Dori and Maya Haddi at a 2005 Yitzhak Rabin tribute concert: A year earlier, Lambert won rave reviews for his performance as Joshua in a musical version of “The Ten Commandments,” staged…
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Life And the ‘Internet Oscar’ Goes to … Forward.com
There will be no winsome Sally Field-style acceptance speech, no wacky Cher-inspired get-up, and definitely no overzealous kiss à la Adrien Brody. While we’re not prone to theatrics, we at www.forward.com are kvelling about our “Internet Oscar” nod. On Tuesday, we got word that our site, for the third consecutive year, has been named an…
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Culture Former Mayor Ed Koch on His Bout With Depression
In the Forward’s Bintel Brief advice column this week, Ed Koch — New York City’s 105th mayor — speaks candidly about his bout with depression. Responding to a question from an ailing elderly woman who feels her life is no longer worth living, Koch shares how, in 1989, when he was the mayor of New…
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Life On Iran, Roger Cohen v. Jeffrey Goldberg
One day after Atlantic writer and blogger Jeffrey Goldberg announced that he would be “checking out for a while” — taking a blogging break to “buy some horseradish, among other things” — Roger Cohen, in a New York Times op-ed that referenced Goldberg’s recent interview with Benjamin Netanyahu, accused Goldberg (a Forward alum) of being…
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News At a KinkyJews Seder, Pharoah Isn’t the Only One With the Whip
Forget the bitter herbs. When about 100 Jews gather in Brooklyn on April 5 for a pre-Passover Seder, they will pay homage to their enslaved ancestors not with the traditional sinus-clearing horseradish, but by spanking each other with wands of chocolate licorice. They will recount the story of Passover with a liberal dose of double…
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Life New York’s ‘Heymishe’ King of Swing
Ever since the Loehmann’s opened its doors there in 2007, the basement of the Ansonia apartment tower on Manhattan’s Upper West Side has become a destination for bargain hunters. A generation ago, the building’s basement was destination of another sort: It housed the wildly popular heterosexual sex club Plato’s Retreat, over which New York’s “King…
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Life About That Seventh Commandment…
So much for the seventh commandment — you know, the one that forbids adultery. Shaindy.com, which that caters to Orthodox Jews seeking extramarital liaisons, launched on March 19 — and has since attracted a reported 350 people willing pay the site’s $99 registration fee. According to an article in Sunday’s New York Post, the site…
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