The actor Jesse Eisenberg has applied for Polish citizenship. In a recent interview with the Polish publication Glos Wielkopolski, he said his family and his wife’s family are from Poland, and that he was looking for a way to create better relations between Jews and Polish people. He applied for citizenship nine months ago and is now “waiting for the final signature.”
This year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction went to Jewish author Nathan Thrall for his book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy. Published days before Oct. 7, the book focuses on a Palestinian father’s efforts to uncover news about his son following a bus crash. The Pulitzer jury called it “...a finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank.” While Thrall’s book [...]
Shul member Graham Diamond was one of the invited speakers at the Riverhead Free Library on Monday, May 6, to mark the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The writer had collaborated with Holocaust survivor Aron Goldfarb on a memoir, Maybe You Will Survive, first published in 1991, in which Goldfarb tells the story of his experiences as a 12-year-old in Nazi-occupied Poland, his escape from a labor camp, his life in hiding, and his survival. [...]
Ted Comet, creator of New York City’s Israel parade, celebrated his 100th birthday on May 23. This year’s parade will take place on June 2, and Comet will be an honorary grand marshal. He has played leading roles in Jewish organizations for more than 75 years, including the Joint Distribution Committee, American Zionist Youth Foundation, Council of Jewish Federations, Israel Folk Dance Festival, and the first large demonstration in support of Soviet Jewry.
Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who worked on more than 30 Broadway shows from the 1960s to the 2000s, died on April 12, in Manhattan. She was 81. Critics hailed Ms. Robbins’ costumes over the years for transporting audiences to the Spain of Don Quixote, the underworld of early-18th-century London, and the ruined South during the Civil War. For “Grease,” she studied high school yearbooks from the 1950s. For a 1992 musical [...]
Howie Schwab, a sports nerd who parlayed his love of statistics into a long stint at ESPN that was most notable for his starring role as the ultimate trivia expert on the game show, “Stump the Schwab,” died on April 27 in Aventura, FL. He was 63. On “Stump the Schwab,” three challengers vied to outdo Mr. Schwab in answering questions posed by the host, Stuart Scott. Mr. Schwab almost always won. The show ran [...]
Lesley Hazleton, a British-born Jewish psychologist, journalist and author, whose curiosity about faith and religion led her to write biographies of Muhammad, Mary and Jezebel, died on April 29 at her home, a houseboat in Seattle. She was 78. She moved to Jerusalem in 1966, at age 20, and lived there through two wars and one peace treaty, working as a journalist for The Jerusalem Post and as a stringer for Time magazine. She left [...]
Jerome Rothenberg, a poet, translator and anthologist whose efforts to bring English-language readers into contact with creative traditions far outside the Western establishment — a field he called ethnopoetics — had an enormous impact on world literature, died on April 21 at his home in Encinitas, CA. He was 92. By ethnopoetics, Mr. Rothenberg meant poetry from indigenous and other non-Western cultures, including Jewish mysticism, American Indian, Dada, and a range of poetries from Europe, [...]
Sheppie Abramowitz, a political insider who became a powerful ally for refugees around the world, died on April 7 in Washington. She was 88. For more than five decades, Ms. Abramowitz was active in movements to solve refugee crises — in Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and Kosovo. She used her deep knowledge of government officials, logistics and the struggles of those fleeing war and oppressive governments to secure real relief. Her husband, Morton I. Abramowitz, was [...]
Dr. Werner Spitz, a pathologist whose accounts of the traumatic last moments in some of the most sensational American deaths of the past 60 years figured in cases involving President John F. Kennedy, that carried a message of feminist empowerment, died on April 20 in Barrington, R.I. She was 81. In 1973, Ms. Specht was a copywriter at the McCann-Erickson agency in Manhattan. Preference was created to challenge Clairol’s Nice ‘n Easy. Her copy empowered [...]
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