Jerusalem – Israel’s ongoing clash over conversion to Judaism, the so-called “Who is a Jew?” debate, flared into crisis again last month when a state-funded religious academy, created to ease the would-be convert’s path, declared that it was freezing referrals of candidates to state-run rabbinical courts for conversion until the chief rabbinate appoints new and…
The recent assault on one of the world’s most recognizable survivors of Nazi death camps, Elie Wiesel, has several Jewish communal leaders warning that Holocaust deniers are resorting to increasingly aggressive tactics. In the attack, which occurred February 1 but was not picked up by the media for several days, the author and Nobel Peace…
The escalating confrontation between Iran and the West has produced an atomic “whodunit,” with fingers pointing across the Middle East. Last month, Iran reported the death of Ardeshir Hassanpour, 44, one of the country’s leading nuclear scientists. The news fueled a wave of rumors and conspiracy theories in cyberspace. Radio Farda, which is funded by…
Efraim “Effi” Eitam, a leader of Israel’s right-wing Orthodox Zionist camp, is criticizing President Bush’s Iraq policy, saying it could end up undermining efforts to confront Iran. Eitam, who sits on the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and is the leader of the Renewed National Religious Zionist party, spent three days last week in…
The European Union has reportedly concluded that Iran cannot be prevented from attaining nuclear weapons capability. “At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the capacity to enrich uranium on the scale required for a weapons program,” Monday’s Financial Times newspaper quoted an internal E.U. document as saying. “The Iranians have pursued their…
Viewed logically, the scene didn’t look a whole lot like an attempt to undermine Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple: At the bottom of a small trapezoidal pit, a single Palestinian laborer wearing a blue hard hat carefully scraped dark soil into a bucket and handed it up to another man standing on a…
Florence Melton, a pioneer in Jewish education, died February 8 in Florida at age 95. She will be forever immortalized in the schools of adult Jewish education around the world that bear her name. Born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents, Melton never graduated from high school; however, she described herself as having been born…
In the wake of former president Jimmy Carter’s high-profile visit to Brandeis University, the school is being accused of blocking controversial speakers, both pro- and anti-Israel, from making future speeches on campus. Late last month, Brandeis administrators denied a request by student groups to bring Norman Finkelstein, a left-wing political theory professor well known for…
Three state assembly members and a lone county supervisor in Los Gatos, Calif., were no match this week for 500 Jews demanding more money for health care. “We meet tonight to ensure health care coverage for all county residents,” said Rabbi Joel Fleekop of Congregation Shir Hadash, a local congregation and host of the February…
In a surprise move, certain pro-choice women’s organizations — including the largest Jewish one — are joining Christian conservatives in criticizing the governor of Texas for requiring sixth-grade girls to be vaccinated against a cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease. Governor Rick Perry, who is generally seen as a staunch ally of the Christian right, last week…
We’ve already noted Marty Peretz’s obsession with George Soros. Now the New Republic big cheese has broken new ground in Soros-bashing: blaming the billionaire financier for airline mishaps. Really, though, our main gripe with Peretz has nothing to do with Soros, and everything to do with the TNR chief’s calling our deputy Web editor “Arthur.”…
