Jew York Times

Betrayed by Madoff, Yeshiva University Adds a Lesson is on the front page of today's Times. It is a largely harmless discussion of how the school was affected by Madoff and Merkin. Some students and professors are quoted about what it means to be a Jew, and a few clop al cheit about how fraud and Judaism sometimes correlate. Surprisingly, the article is howler free, though it does make the dubious claim that YU "[s]tudents do not have to be Jewish." Technically, true I suppose.

Deep in the Arts section, I found Music Review - Matisyahu - A Kosher-Pop Reggae Hanukkah at Webster Hall. I was charmed to learn that Matisyahu asked an audience member to light the menorah midway through his concert, the first of eight "Festival of Lights" shows he has planned. I was also pleased to read that the reviewer shares my general opinion of Matisyahu's "awkward rhythms" and his "thin and sometimes nasal" voice.

In A War Still Seen Through Stained Glass, which discussed Germany's efforts to force Russia to return some stained glass windows Russia kept following WWII, I found this snarky pro-Jewish point "Since the late 1940s, successive German governments tried to persuade Russian authorities to return the war booty, often pursuing that goal more actively than compensating the mostly Jewish owners or their heirs of art that had been confiscated by the Nazis."

And in the Science section, I found Cases - From a Place of Fire and Weeping, Lessons on Memory, Aging and Hope, in which a geriatric psychiatrist tells about a holocaust survivor he treated. It also contains a shocking account of a massacre of some 920 Jews in Rakov, Belarus.

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