Articles in the Press

Teaching Yiddish gets Modern Spin at Rutgers
12/06/2011 — Three times each week, a handful of Rutgers students come to play their part in keeping alive a language that was supposed to have become extinct generations ago, but stubbornly refuses to die.

Forward
An Alter-ed Perspective on the Bible
12/02/2011 — Robert Alter sees problems in translations, stating "broadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew."

Film Depicts Priest Caught Between Two Worlds
11/28/2011 — Israeli filmmaker Ronit Kertsner’s documentary Torn tells the dilemma of a man who found out about his Jewish heritage 12 years after becoming a Catholic priest and came to Israel to study the religion of his biological parents.

Rutgers Event Links Hatred of Jews and Muslims
10/21/2011 — A program on stereotypical portrayals of Jews and Muslims drew an unusually diverse crowd “Going Viral: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the Role of the Media,” which featured an Arab-American academic and a Jewish specialist on anti-Semitism.

For Rutgers Interns, a Chance to Learn and Convey History’s Impact
10/14/2011 — The Lipper Internship Program sends college students like Weiner and Burzichelli into schools throughout the northeast United States with a message of tolerance and co-existence.

Famed architect's vision links Sept. 11 and the Shoa
9/21/2011 — A week after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, architect Daniel Libeskind told a Rutgers audience how his master plan for the former World Trade Center site and his design for the Jewish Museum Berlin aimed to fill the voids left by the almost unimaginable loss of life.

Ground Zero Memorial planner visits campus
Daniel Libeskind, master planner of the Ground Zero Memorial, and James Young, professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, came together to discuss architecture as a civil art in public spaces.

3/28/2011 — Prof. Eddy Portnoy, an instructor of Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University and an expert on cartoons in the Yiddish press, and Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor at The New Yorker, examine how Jewish messages and imagery have changed since the late 19 century.

4/1/2011 — Humor in the early editorial cartoons during the formative years of the Yiddish press in the late 19th and early 20th century, also was meant to stimulate thought, but it was far from subtle, according to Portnoy.

3/23/2011 — Responding to student demand, Rutgers University will next year inaugurate the state’s first master’s degree program in Jewish studies.

3/10/2011 — Department of Jewish Studies offers the only program in New Jersey that confers a bachelor’s and now a master's degree in this area of academic study.

2/22/2011 — No topic has been as personally jarring as the suffering of the Romanis, a nomadic people also known as Gypsies, during the Holocaust.

1/31/2011 — There are three major obstacles on the road to conflict resolution and reconciliation, and ultimately to a better future for all parties involved: The desire to win, the need to be vindicated and the quest for retribution. While being rooted in intrinsic human urges and needs, they are irrevocably futile and counter-productive. All three impediments are flagrantly exposed in the mounting tensions around BAKA: Students United for Middle Eastern Justice group's activities on campus and the reactions they invoke. Unfortunately, instead of dialogue and understanding, animosity and misconstruction rule while ineffective means and bad counsel defeat good intentions.