Jews

A Holocaust museum in Israel has slightly softened its rhetoric regarding the inaction of Pope Pius XII in the face of the deportation of Jews during World War II. Yad Vashem -- the cultural center for Holocaust studies in Jerusalem -- changed the wording on an explanatory wall panel that is part of an ongoing display. The modified wall panel, which was installed Sunday, incorporates views of those who defend the Pope.  Pope Pius XII has long been a figure of contention between the Vatican and Israel.

NEW YORK - You don't have to be in your twilight years to appreciate the off-Broadway show "Old Jews Telling Jokes. " But speaking of mortality, have you heard the one about the doctor who tells his patient that he has bad news and worse news? The bad news is that the patient has only 24 hours to live. "Twenty-four hours to live? What could possibly be the worse news?" the patient asks the doctor. "That I couldn't get ahold of you yesterday," the doctor says. There is a joke for every occasion in "Old Jews," a five-person revue that has become an unlikely hit since opening at New York's Westside Theater a month ago. Audiences have packed the 250-seat house to laugh knowingly and recite punch lines collectively; they wait outside the stage door to share their own jokes with actors and even stop producers on the street to say they can tell them better.

If you had the keys to your country's Twitter account, what would you say? Well, Sonja Abrahamsson has caused a bit of a stir with her tweets about Jews from the @Sweden handle. This week's vox populi via @Sweden from Abrahamsson has delved into such curiosities as "Whats the fuzz with jews. You can't even see if a person is a jew," without intimate examination, she wrote in more explicit terms. As you can imagine, her tweets have caught some flack and attention.

TEL AVIV - It's a bright Saturday morning and shopkeepers at the trendy Tel Aviv Port shopping mall are bracing for the thousands of Israeli families about to descend upon the city's busiest outdoor retail promenade. But among the first visitors many Saturdays is a city inspector, who goes store to store issuing $200 citations to business owners for violating Tel Aviv's ordinance against conducting commerce on the Jewish Sabbath. Small-shop owners fire off cellphone text messages to warn one another that the inspector is making the rounds; then they chase out customers and shut their doors until he passes.

Nearly all the considerable attention generated by Peter Beinart's "The Crisis of Zionism" has focused on its final 81/2 pages. There, warning that the "hour is late," he calls for liberal supporters of Israeli democracy to engage in "direct action" against Israeli occupation of the territories occupied after the June 1967 war. To save Israel from what he sees as the corrosive effects of settlement in the West Bank, he says, American Jews should boycott...

Sundown Friday marks the beginning of Passover, the commemoration of the Jews' emancipation from enslavement in ancient Egypt. This year Passover falls on a day of enormous significance in the struggle for freedom in modern Egypt — April 6. That date is synonymous with the April 6 Youth Movement — formed in 2008 and named for the date of a planned strike to support Egyptian workers — that became the backbone of last year's Tahrir revolution that...

Is this a buy sign for bread crumbs? Billionaire Warren Buffett purchased bread crumbs -- and just about anything else that has wheat and the other grains forbidden to Jews during the observance of Passover -- from a local rabbi, Jonathan Gross of Beth Israel Synagogue in Omaha, Neb. It is ritual that goes on worldwide in Jewish communities. Families designate rabbis to find a non-Jew such as Buffett to purchase their chametz, or food made with leavening, before the holiday.

This post has been corrected.  See note below for details. Jew Pond likely will not be Jew Pond much longer. Mont Vernon, N.H., voted Tuesday night to petition to have the moniker changed. It was not a unanimous vote. Feelings were mixed on the subject in the small New England town. "Here in New England, there's a lot of history and tradition," Rich Masters, health officer for Mont Vernon, told The Times on Wednesday, "and a lot of folks highly value that.

Steve Bridges Impersonator of George W. Bush Steve Bridges, 48, a comic actor and impersonator who was best known for his mimicry of President George W. Bush and appeared alongside the chief executive at the 2006 White House Correspondents Assn. dinner, was found dead Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. Bridges had recently returned home from China, where he had been performing, said his brother Phillip. He appeared to have died of natural causes, but an autopsy is scheduled.

Taking baptisms too far Re "Mormon Church apologizes," Feb. 15 I am insulted to my core by the Mormon Church's posthumous baptism of Jews, including the parents of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. My father's family was totally decimated by the Nazis, and so was part of my mother's family. Are we living in the 21st century or in the Dark Ages? This is cynicism at its highest form. It also exposes the Mormon Church as a lying entity. In the past, the church promised that this ghoulish practice of baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims would stop, but it didn't.