As leaders of Conservative Judaism prepare to gather for the long-awaited vote on ordaining gay rabbis and sanctioning same-sex unions, a prominent liberal rabbi has thrown a wild card into the mix with the last-minute submission of a radically different proposal. The widespread assumption in recent months has been that the movement’s 25-member lawmaking body…
Israel reached a cease-fire agreement last weekend with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Despite widespread skepticism, it’s been the cause of intense if cautious optimism on the center and left of the political spectrum. The right is furious. The military is holding its breath. Why the skepticism? First, this is not a…
The sudden steps toward a thaw in Israeli-Palestinian relations this week have raised hopes in the Bush administration of a renewed Middle East peace process — and, some sources say, boosted chances of cooperation by moderate Arab countries in American efforts to stabilize Iraq. Sources close to the administration say that Washington helped to broker…
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia – Even in the strange capitalist environment of post-Soviet Russia, the Nadezhda factory in suburban St. Petersburg stands out. The factory, which produces walkers and crutches, was built not by one of Russia’s new tycoons but rather by an American charity: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Its name comes from the…
KIEV, Ukraine – Kiev is one of the greenest cities in Europe, but Anatoly Kravets and his wife have not been out of their one-bedroom apartment for the past year. The apartment is a third-floor walk-up, and Anatoly had one of his legs amputated last year, leaving him confined to a clunky red wheelchair that…
Jorge Telerman, the new mayor of Buenos Aires, is an energetic, dashing man, even when suffering and sniffling through a wicked spring flu. The high-octane 51-year-old, a former journalist and ambassador to Cuba who previously served as minister of culture for the city, is the ultimate urban animal, prowling his city’s streets in good times…
Confession: I have had a running debate for the past dozen years or so with my friend Irwin Kula. Being a journalist, I tend to see almost every crisis, from war and hunger to loneliness, in political terms. People should be given a fair shot at supporting themselves, I figure, and then left alone to…
Newly re-elected to a second term in the U.S. House of Representatives, a Jewish lawmaker from Florida is vying for a seat on one of the most powerful committees in Congress and is a candidate for a high-profile Democratic campaign post. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a good government liberal who is commonly viewed as a Democratic…
Here’s a measure of the political mood in America’s Modern Orthodox community: At a convention last week in Jerusalem of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America — the main voice of Modern Orthodoxy — guest of honor Ehud Olmert won less applause than the war in Iraq did. Olmert received a few seconds…
A deadly incident rife with racial and political overtones has roiled France for the past week and heightened a sense of siege among the country’s 600,000-strong Jewish community. On November 23, a fan of the Paris Saint-Germain soccer team was shot and killed and another fan was seriously wounded by a plainclothes police officer who…
When Canada’s Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, recently accused the opposition Liberal Party of being “anti-Israel,” Liberals and the media looked for a credible rebuttal not from Jewish members of the party but from the politician who is considered by many in the community to be an “honorary Jew.” The counterattack was quickly forthcoming from…
