In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with Forward staff writer Paul Berger and opinion editor Gal Beckerman about new revelations concerning Alan Gross, a Jewish American aid worker who is serving a 15-year prison sentence in Cuba. Then, Forward fellow Naomi Zeveloff stops by to discuss an about-face for the hawkish Israel advocacy…
I’ve been following the Alan Gross saga for the past two years now and have often felt alone. The story of the seemingly hapless technology expert who found himself jailed in Cuba for trying to help the miniscule Jewish community connect to the internet has never gotten much pickup among American Jews and has elicited…
The wife of jailed American contractor Alan Gross said she was “simply heartbroken” that the Cuban government refused to release him along with nearly 3,000 prisoners being freed in an amnesty. “To receive news in the middle of Hanukkah that the Cuban authorities have once again overlooked an opportunity to release Alan on humanitarian grounds…
To understand the reason that Alan Gross, an American citizen, has been languishing in a Cuban jail for the past two years, it is instructive to listen to an exchange that took place recently at a hearing of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. Rep. David Rivera (R-Fla.) demanded that Wendy Sherman, undersecretary of state…
An emotional Judy Gross recently pleaded with thousands of Jewish community leaders to help free her husband from a prison in Cuba, marking a public shift in what has been, up to now, a strategy of quiet diplomacy on his behalf. “Let the Cuban government know that the Jewish community wants Alan home,” Gross implored…
Life is getting better for Cuba’s Jews — and for the country’s Scrabble players. Just ask a guy named Fidel. That’s the gist of an entertaining feature in yesterday’s L.A. Times, which tells the story of Fidel Babani, a member of Cuba’s tiny Jewish community and the president of the Cuban Scrabble Association. Dubbed “Señor…
A Monument to Hatuey in Baracoa, Cuba. Photo by Michal Zalewski. A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. In 1931, Yiddish poet, journalist and editor Ascher Penn published “Hatuey,” a 126-page epic poem about a Taíno chieftain who fought against the Spanish invasion of Cuba at the beginning of the 16th century, and who…
Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Wheel of Conscience’ in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Courtesy Canadian Jewish Congress. The ill-fated voyage of the MS St. Louis, the Hamburg-based ocean liner intended to transport 907 mostly German Jewish refugees to Cuba in May 1939, has always played a central role in early Holocaust history, and not only because it unraveled, tragically,…
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