Новости за 21.04.2016

The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was expelled from a political gathering on Paris’ Place de la République by angry protestors on Saturday night. He had been attempting to join Nuit debout, an Occupy-style grassroots movement that has been holding nightly meetings in opposition to proposed labor reforms. Finkielkraut was there for over an hour before he got into an argument with activists and was heckled as a “fascist.”

My Jews, the seder is nigh upon us. Clocking in at over 1,500 years, it is not only among the most universally practiced Jewish rituals, it is also currently the oldest continuously practiced ritual service on the planet. True story.

De-cluttering has become an integral part of my obsessive Passover cleaning ritual. As the holiday approaches, I sift through overstuffed closets, drawers, and bookcases for stuff to donate, toss, or sell.

As someone who has spent the past four years reporting in Southeast Asia, I want to make a suggestion: this Passover, put down the Haggadah for a few minutes and read aloud from an essay by actor Mandy Patinkin about his trip to Cambodia.

Not long ago, I was telling a historian friend, himself a specialist on Puerto Rico and the post-emancipation Caribbean, about the Jewish settlers of Suriname, with their sugar and coffee plantations and slaves. “What did they do at Passover?” he asked. I told him that I had asked myself the same question, and that was one of the reasons that back in 1995 I had started to study the Jews of Suriname, including the Nassys, who had been among the founding families of the colony. I had asked myself... Читать дальше...

This week on Unorthodox, we’re searching for chametz and waiting for the Red Sea to part.

Every divorce brings its own challenges, and one of mine is that I no longer get the cushy Passover gig I once did: an all-expense paid trip to some exotic locale where I got to bask in the sun while my husband worked. Now my children will be getting that trip—and I’m happy for them, I swear!—while I try not to sulk too obviously in a corner of my mother’s living room.

Every year at my family’s Passover seder, a special matzo cover decorates our table. To all appearances, this is a standard embroidered matzo cover, like those found in many Jewish homes. But it is anything but ordinary. This cover made its way from Jerusalem to Moscow and back again in the days before the collapse of the Soviet Union.