Congress is heading into the last days of its lame duck session and the agenda is packed with major legislation to deal with — but there’s always time to slip in a pro-Israel resolution before legislators leave the city. The resolution, H. Res-1734, which passed Wednesday without a vote, is a response to what Israel…
The American Public Affairs Committee has frequently condoned its employees’ receipt of classified information, according to documents filed in federal court by lawyers for Steve Rosen, a former senior official of the pro-Israel lobby. The new court filing, submitted December 15, offers Rosen’s response to claims by AIPAC that he acted improperly by obtaining classified…
Help on the Way for the Food Challenged, Announced at Food Allergy Ball Among the gowned, the beautiful, the allergic and their loved ones at Food Allergy Initiative’s December 6 Food Allergy Ball were Marion Wiesel, Mary Richardson Kennedy and Ingeborg Rennert**. Gala co-chair and FAI vice chair Sharyn Mann told the black-tie crowd at…
In this excerpt from Gal Beckerman’s “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, Henry Kissinger is introduced as the main opponent to the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a piece of legislation that would force the Soviet Union to liberalize its emigration policy if it wanted to receive Most Favored…
When Max Berger started college in 2004, he didn’t know whether he would finish. His father, uncle and grandfather all dropped out of school to start businesses. As a child growing up in a small town outside Boston, Berger was taught that “you kind of cheated” if you couldn’t achieve success without a college degree….
An edict signed by dozens of Israeli rabbis barring the sale or rental of homes to non-Jews in Israel has led to a rare consensus among American rabbis, who have issued a nearly unanimous condemnation of the ban. Statements by the American Modern Orthodox and Conservative rabbinic associations, and by the spokesman for an American…
The clouds gathered over the women’s Zionist group Hadassah began to part on December 9, when the organization announced that it had reached a tentative settlement allowing it to pay back about half the money it earned in Bernard Madoff’s multibillion dollar Ponzi scheme. The news came amid a flurry of developments in the Madoff…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly promised that he will “surprise the critics and the skeptics” with his willingness to demonstrate flexibility and to compromise in order to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. Now, with Washington adopting a new approach toward Middle East peacemaking, Netanyahu’s willingness is about to be put to the…
Every Friday night, Alan Gross pulls out a photograph of a group of friends enjoying Sabbath dinner. Isolated in a Cuban prison cell, he intones the blessing over the bread and wine and stares at the photo of the people, a few families in Maryland that he and his wife used to gather with every…
After more than a year of fine-tuning, the criteria for earning a Magen Tzedek, the “seal of justice” to be awarded to kosher food producers that meet a detailed set of ethical standards, are about to be tested by American food companies. The seal would be added to products that already merit a hekhsher, or…
I was raised Jewish in a suburb outside Atlanta. Being Jewish in the South during the 1980s and ’90s was such a difficult task. It left me sympathetic to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and how he must have felt while being ostracized and excluded from all the “reindeer games.” I myself was never invited to…
