To some, they are courageous heroes bringing transparency to the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces. To others, they are a collection of turncoats who publish unaccountable and unverifiable reports, motivated by politics and a hatred of their military. Breaking the Silence, a group composed of army veterans and reservists, thrust itself into the news…
I know we are in the season of fasts for many Jews but here is a simple (yet a bit time consuming) recipe that tastes great! We have been getting quite a bit of zucchini in our CSA box. I even made a healthier version of this (the one without the pineapple) zucchini bread using…
Forty-five minutes at the White House was all it took to crystallize the new paradigm defining the relations among the Obama administration, the Jewish community and Israel. As Jewish leaders left their July 13 meeting with President Obama — “glowing,” according to one of the participants — it became clear that despite some misgivings regarding…
They are the inhabitants of Israel who live in limbo. Since 2005, an estimated 12,500 people have arrived in Israel, seeking asylum from Sudan and Eritrea. One group, the Sudanese, are suffering because their native country is Israel’s enemy; the Eritreans, because their country is Israel’s friend. Israel refuses to give residency to people from…
“What’s a nice professor of Jewish studies doing teaching in a place like this?” For those unfamiliar with contemporary Egyptian intellectual life, this might be the first question that comes to mind upon meeting Mohamed Hawary, a professor of Hebrew studies and Jewish thought at Ain Shams University in Cairo, a teeming school of some…
Efforts to bring together Jewish and Muslim communities hit another snag when an imam at a major Muslim conference gave an incendiary speech in which he said Jews were to blame for the Holocaust. The speech came during the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, which was attended by rabbis who have…
Crowds at the Royal Ontario Museum’s heavily hyped Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition — Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World, which runs until January 3, 2010 — have far exceeded the museum’s own expectations. In the show’s first nine days, more than 18,000 people flocked to the museum’s spectacular new Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin…
“Another soldier,” Anastasia Michaeli Samuelson said, patting her belly proudly when asked the sex of her soon-to-be-born eighth child. Michaeli, a glamorous 34-year-old Knesset member from Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, is not being flippant. Nor is she daunted by the domestic burdens her concept of feminine patriotism implies. “God gave women powers,” she told…
The Claims Conference announced July 15 that Gregory Schneider will become the group’s new executive vice president. Schneider, 42, succeeds Gideon Taylor, who resigned to return to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Schneider has worked for the conference since 1995. Since 1951, the conference has worked to secure restitution for Nazi victims and their…
Now a regular fixture on the front pages of Israel’s Sunday newspapers, pictures of parking protests by sometimes violent Haredim seem to chronicle a simple and familiar problem: religious-secular friction. In reality, the photos tell a different, more complicated story. In the months of June and July, there have been mass protests, turning violent at…
Seven Yemeni Jews, refugees from the heightened tensions in their homeland, have arrived in New York and begun settling into new lives amid the Orthodox community in Monsey. They are the first wave of what could be as many as 113 Yemeni Jews who are expected to immigrate to the United States, some as early…
