Leonard Fein
By Leonard Fein
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Opinion No Thanks, Mr. President
Depend on it: Before long former New York mayor Ed Koch, Rep. Eric Cantor and Republican National Committee head Ken Mehlman will be telling American Jews that we owe George W. Bush a vote of gratitude for his steadfast support of Israel in its current conflict with Hezbollah. And there are doubtless large numbers of…
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Opinion When War’s Not That Far Away
Abba Houshi was the mayor of Haifa from 1951 until his death in 1969. No Israeli mayor has governed with as much authority and none save Teddy Kollek, who was mayor of Jerusalem for 29 years, governed with greater imagination. I spent some time with Houshi while he was mayor, not long after the opening…
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Opinion Diverging From Convergence
Edwin Seligman, a founder of the American Economic Association, once wrote that there was nothing wrong with the property tax except that it was mistaken in theory and impossible in practice. So also, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s signature proposal, called in Hebrew “hitkansut,” rendered best in translation as “consolidation” or “convergence.” What Olmert has in…
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Opinion When No One Believes in Peace
It’s the juxtapositions that do it, every time. They beguile, they irritate, they disconcert, they seduce and confuse and fascinate without end. The evening sea breeze reaches the patio off the beach in southern Jaffa. On the beach, a scattering of families, the children mostly young. Arabs; that’s mostly who live in this part of…
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Opinion A Talk With Tzipi
At the end of a week of meetings here in Jerusalem with, among others, five senior Cabinet ministers, sundry Knesset members and several Palestinians, it is not the sprawling nature of the issues nor even the matter of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s unilateralist intentions that most concerns me. Quite to my surprise, it is an…
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Opinion Looking for God At Auschwitz
Pope Benedict XVI, visiting Auschwitz, did not say what Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League says he should have said. “We are surprised, upset and sad,” Foxman said. “He talked about the universal dimension of the Holocaust in the world’s largest Jewish cemetery, and he did not talk about the specific policy against the Jews….
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Opinion What If There Is a Partner?
Last week’s statement by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, was the first time — the first time ever — that Palestinians have seized an imaginative and potentially constructive diplomatic initiative. Abbas gave Hamas 10 days, until June 4, to accept the specific proposals of what has come to be known as “the prisoners’…
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Opinion On Our Very Own Streets
Yes, there’s Iraq and Iran and Hamas and Fatah. There’s gas prices and NSA and CIA and the stock market. There are typhoons and volcanic eruptions and soon, again, hurricanes. There’s Darfur and taxes, the morning-after pill and the essay by Mearsheimer and Walt, and that’s quite enough for the moment, thank you very much….
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