With the election season nearly in full swing, President Obama's campaign fund-raisers have reason to be nervous. The U.S. economy remains deep in the doldrums and there's growing bipartisan criticism in Congress over Obama's Afghanistan withdrawal plans -- not to mention his costly and confusing undeclared war mess in Libya.

With the exception of September 11, 2001, no disaster has ever traumatized New York more than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911 - 100 years ago this weekend.

It broke out on a balmy afternoon after someone carelessly tossed what was probably a cigarette butt into...

New York's annual Sephardic Film Festival is always a tasty treat. First and foremost, it provides us with a cinematic kaleidoscope of the destinies of the descendants of those hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews expelled from Iberia by the 15th century Inquisition. Refusing to be forcibly converted to Catholicism,...

Visiting Muammar Gaddafi's Libya was always like dropping into "Abdul in Wonderland."

Marketplaces were jammed with shops but empty of goods. Enormous signboards bore the illogical slogans of the even more illogical Green Book, the bible of Gaddafi's Jamahiriya - state of the masses.

Walls were plastered with enormous...

Hello out there, all you people deliriously celebrating the victory of democracy in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Please take some advice from an old Mideast hand: hold your horses (not to mention your camels).

I have not the slightest doubt that it was those 18 days of millions of heroic civilian...

"You Americans always want quick solutions," Hosni Mubarak once told me during an interview in Cairo. "But," he added quickly, "in this part of the world there are no quick solutions; only accommodations."

Mubarak's words ring as true today as they did when Egypt's embattled president uttered them nearly...

Talk about horrific scandals!

The Justice Department has just announced that more than $40 million in funds earmarked for aid to needy and aging survivors of the Nazi Holocaust have instead been stolen and fraudulently distributed to thousands of people who were not at all eligible to receive them.

Part four of a five part series. Part one.

"The majority of today's American Jews don't see themselves as outsiders or victims anymore," says Binyamin Jolkovsky, the publisher and editor of the widely read Internet magazine JewishWorldReview.com "That's positive. But that feeling of equality has also...

(Part five of a five-part series)

"The majority of today's American Jews don't see themselves as outsiders or victims anymore," says Binyamin Jolkovsky, the publisher and editor of the widely read Internet magazine JewishWorldReview.com "That's positive. But that feeling of equality has also produced a communal negative. The...

Part four of a five part series. Part one.

At a certain point, many Jews began to wonder if there was something more behind the Obama administration's confrontational approach toward Israel than a simple difference of policy. As a result, they began to take a second look at...

Part three of a five part series. Part one.

On March 10th of this year, a relatively low-level official in the Israeli Interior Ministry issued a permit for 1,600 new housing units for Israelis in the Ramat Shlomo section of East Jerusalem. The ill-timed announcement came on the...

"The Jews have three veltn (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the next world), and Roosevelt."
--Judge Jonah Goldstein, the 1945 Republican candidate for mayor of New York City

In the nearly eighty years since President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal with a pledge to "help the...

Part two of a five part series. Previously.

The current Jewish problem with Obama can be traced back to his first full day on the job. On January 21, 2009, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office and laid out a tough new policy toward...

Imam Feisal Rauf, the Muslim cleric behind the contentious mosque/Islamic Center project near Ground Zero is no stranger to real estate woes. Two hard-working New Jersey investigative reporters, Peter J. Sampson and Jean Rambach of The Bergen Record, have uncovered details of Imam Rauf's career as a public housing landlord...

Like most folks these days, I receive a steady stream of forwarded columns, blogs, articles and other items from the interesting but often invasive world of the internet. And like many other New Yorkers, many of these have lately dealt with the bitter controversy over plans to build an Islamic...

Jewish ghetto police round up Jews for the Nazi camera-man

Aside from Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, nothing epitomizes the horrors of the Holocaust more than the infamous Warsaw Ghetto.

Surrounded by a barbed wire topped 10 foot...

Khaled Abu Toameh, to my mind the best Arab journalist working in Israel and the Palestinian territories, reports in today's Jerusalem Post that "Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has told his Fatah movement he wants a more specific US commitment on the borders of a future Palestinian state before agreeing...

Pixie Harlot Layard, credit Earl Dax

That bottom part of Manhattan, once known as the Lower East Side and East Village and now called simply "Downtown," has its own madly ingenious world of creation and culture - from gay productions at the brand new...

Thanks to invitations from two generous friends, I had the distinct delight last week of spending consecutive musical nights at the magnificent new Alice Tully Hall. Each evening's concert was quite different from the other -- but in the end, both proved genuinely similar in spirit.

The first -- dubbed...