WHERE’S THE PLAN ON IRAN?: New Jersey Jewish News editor Andrew Silow-Carroll suspects that neither Obama nor McCain “has a clue about what to do about Iran.”
TRIBE IN TAIWAN: The Baltimore Jewish Times visits with Taiwan’s tiny Jewish community. The island nation’s Jewish population numbers some 100 to 150 individuals and is led by Ephraim F. Einhorn, an 89-year-old Orthodox rabbi originally from Vienna. “I’m the rabbi, president, treasurer, shamash, ba’al koreh and I pay all the bills,” Einhorn explains.
SHORT IN SHUL: Comedian Martin Short is swinging by a Maryland synagogue, despite being a Roman Catholic. The Baltimore Jewish Times chats with the Canadian-born comic about comedy, Jews and his upcoming performance at Pikesville’s Beth Tfiloh Dahan Sanctuary.
DASHING DETROIT’S HOPES: Detroit Jewish News editor Robert Sklar explains how indicted Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick dashed the high hopes of his city — and of local Jews.
‘ROUGH RIDIN’ RABBI’: In an article for the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, Morris B. Margolies relates how he got dubbed the “Rough Ridin’ Rabbi” during his service as an Army chaplain in the Korean War.
UNITED BY PLATITUDES: Two months ago, the Rev. Eric Lee and Daphna Ziman were embroiled in a high-profile feud. Ziman, a Jewish philanthropist, had written a widely circulated e-mail accusing Lee of having launched into a hateful tirade attacking Jewish influence in Hollywood at a banquet she attended. (She also, somewhat strangely, pointed a finger of blame for Lee’s speech at presidential hopeful Barack Obama.) For his part, Lee, head of the L.A. chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, denied Ziman’s characterization of his words, even as he apologized to her for any offense he had given. Now, the two are making nice in a jointly written opinion article for the L.A. Jewish Journal that is composed almost entirely of platitudes about black-Jewish relations and doesn’t shed any light on the mystery of what Lee actually said at that banquet.
UNFRIENDLY SKYS: The best thing that can be said for the airline is that it didn’t lose her luggage. Instead, when 29-year-old Brit Emma Pelta got her baggage back after her British Airways flight from London to Orlando, Fla., she found it marked with a large swastika. She then spent five months trying to get an apology out of the airline, London’s Jewish Chronicle reports.
SPRINGTIME FOR BRITISH JEWRY?: British Jewry has been shrinking in size for more than a half-century — down from 450,000 in 1950 to somewhere in the neighborhood of between 270,000 and 280,000 today. But is Britain’s Jewish population now growing again? One demographer thinks so. Yaakov Wise of the University of Manchester believes that Britain’s growing ultra-Orthodox sector, with its high birthrates, has tipped the demographic balance for British Jewry as a whole, and that the community’s overall numbers are now trending upward. A researcher with British Jewry’s official Board of Deputies, however, disagreed with Wise’s assessment. “There is no evidence to show that the total number of Jews in the UK is on the rise,” Board of Deputies demographer David Graham says. London’s Jewish Chronicle has the story of the demographic dispute.
