Marla Brown Fogelman
By Marla Brown Fogelman
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News Let’s Do Coffee, Cousin Carrie
Although writer and actress Carrie Fisher and I have never met, we are related in that four-degrees-of-separation way that many Jews and half-Jews are — that is, my maternal great-aunt was married to her paternal great-uncle. I doubt that Ms. Fisher ever knew Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Jack, who are long deceased, and I only…
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News Sundays With ‘Jack,’ Bernie, Harvey and More
As we sit in a music classroom in an independent-assisted living facility in Silver Spring, Md., Jerome “Jack” Bluestein and I talk about Hitler. Or, more specifically, about the “Adolf Hitler” photo album that Bluestein has kept with him for the past 60-plus years. The book was known as a cigarette photo album because it…
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Life My Grandmother’s Obsession Becomes My Own
It was because of my late grandmother and her 40-year obsession with a book called “The Prophet of San Nicandro” that I was sitting at Columbia University’s Café 212, in the middle of a bone-chilling December afternoon, having coffee with professor John Davis. Davis, who holds the chair in Modern Italian History at the University…
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Culture The Curious Case of the San Nicandro Converts
In a new book, “The Jews of San Nicandro,” author John Davis, the chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut, sheds light on the little-known but highly curious tale of how a community of Italian Catholic peasants came to embrace Judaism during the rise of Fascism and the Second World War. Using…
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Culture Italian Hilltop Conversion
The Jews of San Nicandro John Davis Yale University Press, 256 pages, $30 In a remote southern Italian town in the 1930s, a group of Catholics who had never before met any Jews began practicing their own idiosyncratic brand of Judaism. Helmed by a disabled and charismatic WWI veteran named Donato Manduzio, who fancied himself…
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News A Wedding Gift for Mom
It?s five months before my 48-year-old, tree-hugging, hippie sister?s wedding, and my mother and I are in my girlhood bedroom in Wilmington, Del., talking about tradition, family and, most important, bridal wear. ?People ask me what Beth is going to be wearing, but I don?t know,? Mom says, as she smoothes plastic over her mother-of-the-bride…
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News Dutch Jews grapple with ‘weaponization’ of their fear following attack on Israelis
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Opinion Almost all voting groups shifted toward Trump, except American Jews. Why?
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News What a Secretary of State Marco Rubio would mean for American Jews and Israel
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Fast Forward ‘Antisemitic hit-and-run squads’: Amsterdam temporarily bans demonstrations after Israeli soccer fans attacked by street mobs
In Case You Missed It
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Fast Forward Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golf buddy, appointed special envoy to the Middle East
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Yiddish וואָס איז געווען דאָס ערשטע לשון אויף דער גאָרער וועלט?What was the first language on earth?
דער רוימישער אימפּעראַטאָר פֿרעדעריק דער צווייטער האָט געזוכט אַן ענטפֿער צו דער פֿראַגע אויף אַ וויסנשאַפֿטלעכן אופֿן.
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Fast Forward Federal judge temporarily blocks Louisiana’s law requiring classrooms to display Ten Commandments
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Theater They created a musical about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Today’s activists are listening
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