Natalie Mashiah next to her damaged car

A 27-year-old woman was attacked last week while she was hanging posters on behalf of her employer. Natali Mashiah was in the Ramat Beit Shemesh neighborhood when she alleges that a group of Haredi men called her a “slut,” a “shiksa,” and smashed her car’s windshield and windows while she was inside of it. They also threw a rock at her head, punctured the tires and poured bleach inside the vehicle, she said. Police arrested three suspects at the scene.

The financial newspaper Globes is asking why social justice protest leader Stav Shaffir, recently profiled in the Forward, reportedly accepted VIP perks, such as accommodations at a 5-star hotel and an chauffeured Audi, while recently in Munich for a conference.

Knesset State Control Committee chairman Ronnie Bar-On is calling for broader implementation by rabbinical courts of a law that allows rabbinical judges to impose punitive sanctions on men who refuse to give their wife a Jewish divorce document, or a get.

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© 2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller in 1986.

Life moves pretty fast: It seems like just yesterday that Ferris Bueller was taking the day off. But, believe it or not, that was already 26 years ago. And now the righteous dude is back, but it’s not clear yet what he is up to this time.

A teaser video released on Thursday indicates that Matthew Broderick, now 49, will be reprising his role as Bueller in a Superbowl ad. What product will he be hocking? It’s impossible to tell from the very short snippet shown. All we see is a middle-aged Bueller/Broderick, looking bleary-eyed and wearing a white terrycloth robe, opening the curtains on a window. His one line, “How can I handle work on a day like today?” brings back memories, but isn’t too revealing.

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©2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Demi Moore has been having a rough time lately.

First came the announcement of her split with husband Ashton Kutcher. Then, earlier this week, she checked into rehab to overcome her exhaustion and alleged addictions to nitrous oxide and Red Bull. Now word is that we can no longer expect to see her playing feminist icon Gloria Steinem on the big screen.

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© 2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Fuad Haba at the taboon

Septuagenarian Fuad Haba was a long way from his birthplace of Iraq and his family’s famous bakery on Agrippas Street in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market as he made laffa bread in a taboon oven in suburban Toronto. But neither he nor the customers at the new Dr. Laffa restaurant, where the retiree is hard at work, seemed to be deterred by the freezing weather on a recent wintery night.

Fuad was in Toronto helping his son Sasi and Sasi’s business partner Yoram Gabay with their new venture, which brings the tastes, smells and atmosphere of the shuk to an unsuspecting location tucked inside a business park northwest of the city’s main Jewish neighborhoods along the Bathurst Street corridor. The kosher restaurant offers all the typical Israeli (meat) comfort foods, but it is the delicious, fresh laffa — a full foot in diameter — that is its biggest draw.

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© 2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Sandler and Barrymore in 2005

Is it any surprise that, after going out on fifty first dates with Adam Sandler and also falling for him as a wedding singer, Drew Barrymore would say that she is close to her co-star? Of course, not. However, it’s one thing to look to a co-star for friendship and acting advice — or even romantic companionship — and entirely another to seek his services as a religious conversion coach.

But that is exactly what Barrymore is doing, according to In Touch weekly. The gossip magazine reports that Sandler, of “Hanukkah Song” fame, is guiding Barrymore, 36, in her conversion to Judaism as she prepares for her upcoming marriage to her Jewish fiancé, Will Kopelman, a 34-year-old art consultant. Let’s just hope that Sandler knows more about Judaism than how to rhyme yarmulke with Hanukkah and menorah with Dinah Shore-ah.

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© 2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Sixth formers (high school seniors) at JFS, the oldest and largest Jewish day school in England, are being taught that homosexuality can be cured. At least, that is how some students, parents and community leaders understand the inclusion of information about JONAH — Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (an American organization that maintains that homosexuality can be “mitigated and potentially eliminated”) — in a Jewish text class on homosexuality and the Orthodox viewpoint.

Complaints have been lodged with the school’s administration, contending either that introducing the notion of gay “conversion” is offensive, or that at the very least, opposing views to those of JONAH should be included in the class. Material from or mention of Keshet UK, the LGBT forum, were reportedly not part of the course of study.

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© 2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

British newlyweds Ian and Janice Donoff sponsored a kiddush last Shabbat at London’s Stanmore Synagogue — but not for one of the usual reasons, like a bar mitzvah, aufruf, baby naming or birthday. Their celebration was to give thanks for surviving the recent Costa Concordia shipwreck off the coast of Italy.

As the couple was finishing their Shabbat dinner on January 13, they heard a loud crunching sound and the ship’s lights went out. Mr. Donoff, 62, told the Jewish Chronicle that when the ship came to a halt, they realized that something was wrong. “We decided something was amiss and that we should dress warmly,” he said. “We saw people were wearing life-jackets, so we took our passports and I stuffed my siddur and tefillin into my pocket.”

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© 2012  Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Old Borscht Belt hotels never die…they just get boarded up until a new buyer comes along to save them. At least that’s the story when it comes to the Nevele, which closed its doors in the Catskills back in 2009.

The Nevele may indeed have a new lease on life if a sale to the Manhattan-based Claremont Investments LLC goes through. A state judge was to hold a hearing on the sale of the 432-room resort on Monday. Claremont is hoping to work with a casino developer to restore the property, and is betting on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the ban on gambling on non-Indian land in New York State.

The Nevele, located in Wawarsing (near Ellenville, NY), was first opened in 1903. According to local lore, the name of the hotel came from the backward spelling of “eleven” — the number of school teachers in the 19th century who discovered the waterfall situated on the hotel’s property.

© 2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

While some Haredim in Jerusalem have succeeded in getting images of women removed from public advertising there, the Orthodox community in North London has had less luck on that front.

In London, it is not all women’s images they find offensive, but rather those of Calvin Klein models wearing nothing but their skimpy underwear on the sides of public buses driving on routes through Orthodox neighborhoods. According to the Jewish Chronicle, “a claim that a lingerie advert placed on buses that ran through Stamford Hill was ‘offensive’ and ‘irresponsible’ has been rejected by the advertisers’ watchdog because there was ‘no explicit nudity.’”

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© 2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Perhaps in an attempt to put her husband’s very public sexual assault scandal behind her, Anne Sinclair is throwing herself into her work. The former television journalist and wife of Dominque Strauss-Kahn has been named editor of the soon-to-be-launched French version of the Huffington Post.

Ariana Huffington herself will be on hand in Paris on January 23 to formally announce the launch of the news and opinion website, as well as Sinclair’s appointment.

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© 2012 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.