Tevye the Milkman, the working stiff Jewish Everyman from the shtetls of Russia, may not be one of Broadway's sexiest characters, but he certainly has been one of its most enduring. And one actor more than any other has embodied the role of the tradition-bound, world-weary, rich-man obsessed song and...

To the great regret of humanitarians--not to mention actual victims--genocide is both a word for mass murder and an instant conversation killer. The sheer grotesqueness of gas chambers, killing fields, death marches, ditches scattered with bones and blood, and hacked and bulleted bodies, is so grave, its gravity so unspeakably...

For a city that votes solidly for the Democratic Party (except, of course, when it comes to mayor), New York City's connection to Abraham Lincoln -- Republican icon and father of the GOP -- is a political and cultural curiosity. It is also the subject of Lincoln and New York,...

Let's face it: Lunatics and tyrants like Bernard Madoff and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad give clowns a bad name. We're so used to the unending variety of jokers who cause us harm (and who, without makeup or masks, are really scary, too) that it's easy to forget that when the circus comes...

Steely Dan wraps up its series of New York concerts (the Rent Party '09 Tour) at the Beacon Theatre this week proving that Reelin' In The Years takes a lot longer with the passage of time.

These sparkling performances served as a time capsule for those who came of...

Life in New York City usually doesn't call to mind a day at the beach. Yet, Manhattan is an island bordered by rivers with easy passageways to the Atlantic Ocean. Queens is an extension of the beaches of Long Island. And for four consecutive summers the AVP Crocs Tour has...

It is the fate of every New Yorker to experience the occasional catastrophe on this otherwise charmed island. There were the Draft Riots of 1863, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, the Son of Sam in 1977, and, of course, the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in...

American acknowledgment and contrition is, indeed, playing well across the globe. Very early in his administration President Obama sent welcoming words to Iran and conciliatory ones to Cuba.

Now, with his visit to Saudi Arabia and his overture to Islam in Cairo, the Arab street has become quite enamored...

One wouldn't think that such otherwise innocuous words as "empathy" and "life experience" would have the power to unsettle an institution as solid as the legal system, but with the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, President Obama has apparently done just that.

With this, his...

The Obama administration's head-spinning policy shift on the prosecution of suspected terrorists has left its liberal base and human rights advocates wondering whether they had freakishly witnessed the second coming of the Bush presidency.

After deciding soon after the inauguration that Guantanamo's military courts should be suspended in favor of...

This week, a German Pope, Benedict XVI, who, as a young man, served in both the Hitler Youth and in Hitler's army, visited Israel and paid his respects at Yad Vashem's Hall of Remembrance.

Also, this week, a Ukrainian, John Demjanjuk, a former concentration camp guard, was deported to...

This week Barack Obama blazed through the first marker of his nascent presidency with characteristic coolness and panache. At times he seemed to be occupying a White House in hog heaven; at other moments the demands of the job and the state of the world has forced the president to...

All Hollywood sequels demand a good story--not the same as the original, repackaged and rehashed with a tired script and identical cast, but one with a new plot. There should be good and bad guys, although it's best when they're not so easily distinguishable. And while audiences may long for...

Dire economic times bring out the xenophobe in the best of us. The circling of wagons becomes a national callisthenic, preserving jobs and cultural identities a national rite. Nativism suddenly feels like second nature while protectionists proclaim that America is no longer a land of plenty.

There is less willingness...

By now we all know that Bernard Madoff has overtaken Charles Ponzi as the new king of the pyramid scheme. The magnitude of Madoff's losses and the scale of his fraud make Ponzi look as if he was trading in peanuts. Indeed, it's not possible to invert this pyramid without...