Interviews and Profiles

I have closde to 10,000 books, covering all kinds of things in Jewish studies.

I wish I was on my father’s level of kindness, but that is what I’m trying to accomplish, and the people in my office are there to help, and it’s an honor to be working with a group of people who [are about kindness and going above and beyond].

On February 4, 1939, Rabbi Naphtali boarded the RMS Queen Mary from Southampton, England, and arrived in New York on February 9. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the Carlebach family set sail on the Queen Mary on March 18 and arrived in New York on March 23, 1939.

Dean Meminger sat in owner Irv Bader’s office at Camp Seneca Lake and talked of his girlfriend, her battle with lupus and their plans to marry.

In a time when service to one’s community seems to be a forgotten ideal, it is our pleasure to continue sharing with you the stories of those men and women who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.

Today, with health portals being used in so many medical offices and hospitals, this front-end cleanup of patient medical history may actually become a reality.

Whenever people called him a racist, he would answer, “I don’t hate Arabs – I love Jews.”

I asked if they could bring us some food. They gave us a few grapes, apples and crackers. So we did the Kiddush over grapes and the Motzi over some crackers.

If somebody reads that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than people of Scots-Irish descent – and I speak as a Scots-Irish person – and they feel resentful, that’s their problem.

Within days after the AFSI report was released, the Times’s language suddenly changed. The Times went from using that false sentence in every article about Judea-Samaria, to never using it.

The Irgun is famous; Lehi – the other Jewish underground that fought the British in the 1940s – less so. With only 1,000 fighters, as opposed to the Irgun’s 5,000, Lehi is sometimes thought of as the Irgun’s “kid brother.”

JERUSALEM - Doron Sheffer, 37, one of Israel's greatest basketball players, shared his story of return to religious observance with a group of Jewish educators.

There’s also the issue of accusing the Jews of being excessively materialistic and exploitative of non-Jews. You see a lot of that in far-left propaganda – that the Jews are overwhelmingly concentrated in the petty bourgeoisie, which in itself is an archaic class form, and thrives on tricking people and squeezing money out of them through illicit methods of trade.

Thousands of women and girls who have heard Rachel Factor's story have been inspired.

The IDF does its best to accommodate everyone's religious, linguistic and ethnic needs.

Sherwood Goffin has had a storied career. The cantor of Lincoln Square Synagogue since 1965, Goffin started his musical career as a folk singer. From 1961-1995, Goffin sang on major stages worldwide, recorded six albums, and was known as the "Voice of Soviet Jewry," singing at all the major Soviet Jewry UN Solidarity Day rallies from 1964-1991.

In 1989, when Ethiopia and Israel agreed to restore the diplomatic relations that had been broken off by Ethiopia in 1973, thousands of Ethiopian Jews (aka Beta Israel) flooded to Addis Ababa. A year later, Dr. Hodes, an observant Jew from Long Island, N.Y., was hired by the JDC to be the medical director in Ethiopia and oversee their care. The original six-week contract was to morph into nearly twenty-three years...and Hodes is still counting.

The New York Post called him "the nation's foremost journalistic expert on terrorism." Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism chief, called him the "Paul Revere of terrorism." For 16 years, Steven Emerson has been conducting research, reporting, writing, speaking, and testifying before Congress on the threat of radical Islam.

Dr. Oz, who is visiting Israel this week with his wife, Lisa, and their four children, is not just any physician. A cardiac surgeon by training, he is the most watched physician in the United States. Millions of Americans view his television program. “The Dr. Oz Show” is broadcast to more than a hundred countries, including Israel’s Health Channel. His books, which have been translated into dozens of languages, including Hebrew, are runaway bestsellers.

In the months since Agriprocessors - formerly America's largest kosher meatpacking plant - declared bankruptcy in the wake of allegations of unethical and illegal business practices, speculation has abounded: Who will fill the gap in the kosher meat market? Will meat prices go up? Will an Orthodox Jew buy the Postville, Iowa plant?

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has a new book coming out next week, Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet, co-written with attorney Christopher Wolf, a pioneer in Internet law. The book discusses how racists and anti-Semites are using the Internet to disseminate their hateful information and poses tough questions about the responsibility of the public to fight against this phenomenon in the U.S., where the law is highly protective of free speech.

Veteran pro-Israel activist Herbert Zweibon, founder and chairman of Americans for a Safe Israel/AFSI, passed away in New York on Jan. 20 at age 84.

As a former Israeli ambassador to Canada and an expert in international law, Alan Baker has been involved in the negotiation and drafting of agreements and peace treaties with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinians. Last year Baker was thrust into the spotlight when he was appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the three-member committee chaired by former justice Edmund Levy to examine the legal aspects of land ownership in the West Bank. That produced the highly publicized Levy Report.

"My engagement in medicine has taught me that in order to heal one must come in contact with the most repulsive things you can imagine."

Mention the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the image of a blue tzedakah box likely comes to mind. Starting in 1904, Jews throughout the world dropped coins into these blue boxes, helping the JNF buy and develop land in Palestine on behalf of the Jewish people. Although the state of Israel was founded in 1948, the JNF continues to function, helping develop the country in a variety of ways. It has planted 250 million trees in its 108-year existence and still owns 13 percent of the land. The Jewish Press recently spoke with JNF CEO Russell Robinson.

Rabbi Asher Lopatin, longtime spiritual leader of Chicago's Modern Orthodox Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel Congregation, comments about his famous congregant, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel; Jewish rights to settle in Israel; plans to build in the Negev; Orthodoxy and pluralism; and political talk from the pulpit.

The co-founder and former chairman of the MyIsrael (Yisrael Sheli) national movement, the recipient of the 2012 Abramowitz Israeli Prize for Media Criticism and a close associate of Naftali Bennett – the two worked together in the office of Benjamin Netanyahu prior to the 2009 elections – Shaked is raising some eyebrows due to the fact that she, unlike Bennett, is a secular candidate for HaBayit Hayehudi -a traditionally religious party.

Books. Some people love them; others claim they can do without them. For Zalman Alpert, they are essentially his life. For the past 35 years, Alpert has served as a reference librarian at Yeshiva University (YU). Educated at Columbia University’s School of Library Services and New York University’s School of Education, where he attained a master’s degree in Modern Jewish History, Alpert is one of those individuals who knows a little (sometimes a lot) about everything. Over the years, he has contributed articles to such works as Encyclopedia of Hasidim; Jewish American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia; Encyclopedia of Jewish American Popular Culture; Midstream; and The Jewish Press.

"We need to work on instilling a good strong Jewish-Zionist identity in all of the children in Israel and not only in the religious ones. In other words we need to stop looking inward and start focusing on all of Am Yisrael."

If you asked someone to outline the profile of a director making a film on The New York Times’s coverage of the Holocaust, “non-Jewish,” “college student,” and “South Carolina native” would probably not be the first descriptors he would use. Yet, they perfectly fit the profile of Emily Harrold, a 21-year-old senior who is currently completing “Reporting on the Times,” a film inspired by Laurel Leff’s 2005 book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper.