Joe Eskenazi

Sacramento PBS TV affiliate won’t run anti-Semitism documentary

Published on January 18, 2007

David Hosley thinks a scene in which a group of devious Jews slash the throat of a young boy in a ritual slaughter to cull his blood for Passover matzah is not the type of thing that should be shown on television. Yitzhak Santis thinks it's exactly what we should be seeing.

Winning Nobel Prizes seems to run in one family’s chemistry—and biology

Published on October 12, 2006

You've heard of the nuclear family. But how about the deoxyribonucleic family? Thirty-seven years after Arthur Kornberg won the Nobel Prize in medicine, his eldest son, Roger, took home this year's prize in chemistry.

New JTS Head Faces Trouble, Opportunity

Published on April 27, 2006

The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) announced this month that Eisen, 54, the chair of Stanford University's religious studies program, would become just the second nonrabbi to serve as the New York City seminary's chancellor and the first since 1940. He succeeds Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, who held the post for two decades.

Jewish Jury Still Out on Christian ‘Narnia’

Published on December 15, 2005

Catholic publishing companies are putting out companion guides. And the Jewish community is ... well, no one knows quite what to think. That's because the film in question isn't Mel Gibson's "The Passion." It's "The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the special-effects laden adaptation of British author C.S. Lewis' classic 1950 children's book.

Googling Anti-Semitism

Published on March 18, 2004

Online searchers punching the word "Jew" into the Google search engine may be surprised at the results they get.

The Case That Shook the Rabbinate

Published on November 20, 2003

"The Rabbi and the Hit Man," by Arthur J. Magida (HarperCollins, $24.95).

If not for the legion of pederast priests unmasked like some gruesome ecclesiastical episode of "Scooby Doo," Rabbi Fred Neulander might have been a shoo-in for "most infamous religious figure of the past decade."

Now, it's a toss-up. So be it.

Yet after tearing through Arthur J. Magida's "The Rabbi and the Hit Man," the painstakingly detailed account of the rise and fall of Neulander, a philandering New Jersey rabbi who paid an assassin to bludgeon his wife to death in 1994, one can only lapse into a well-worn cliché. Truth is stranger than fiction.