OAKLAND, Calif. — An Israel critic’s lawsuit against a neoconservative provocateur seems poised to become a battle over free speech, though exactly whose speech is being curtailed depends on whom you ask. Joel Beinin, who is a Stanford University history professor and a former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, filed…
The feud between a member of the House Committee on International Relations, Betty McCollum, and the Jewish community’s main pro-Israel lobby appears to have been settled. McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, and Howard Kohr, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, met last week to address the issue. By the end of the meeting,…
As the Food and Drug Administration prepares to approve the first vaccine against infections that cause a majority of cervical cancers, religious conservatives are rallying to keep the vaccine from being mandatory for public school students. Gardasil has been proven effective in blocking the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, or HPV, that causes cervical cancer in…
Stanley Kunitz, a former American poet laureate who in his poetry made metaphoric use of the Talmud and other Jewish images, died Sunday, May 14, at age 100. Kunitz, who was known for writing on themes ranging from life and death to gardens, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1959. The son of Jewish immigrants from…
WASHINGTON — The recent platform embraced by the president of the Palestinian Authority and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Mahmoud Abbas, was carefully crafted behind bars earlier this month by representatives of all the major Palestinian factions. The goal: to put an end to the daily battles on the streets of Gaza between Fatah…
TEL AVIV — Israel drew the Lebanese Hezbollah militia into what some military officials called an ambush this week, as a rocket attack on an Israeli position led to day-long exchanges of fire, at the end of which Hezbollah’s elaborate military installations along the Israeli-Lebanese border lay in ruins. It was the heaviest cross-border fighting…
In a serious setback to Israel’s diplomacy and public relations, two major unions — one in Britain and one in Canada — voted this week to urge boycotts of the Jewish state, with one targeting university professors and the other calling for economic divestment. In England, the country’s largest union of higher education instructors, the…
Neo-Nazi Sentenced The leader of a neo-Nazi community in Chile was sentenced to 20 years in jail after being convicted of child molestation. Paul Schaeffer, leader of Colonia Dignidad, was also ordered late last week by a Chilean court to pay $1.5 million in damages to 11 families of the abuse victims. Chilean prosecutors have…
TORONTO — While Jewish groups in the United States and Canada have taken the lead in urging international intervention in order to stop the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, one Israeli-Canadian isn’t waiting for governments to act. Toronto-based philanthropist Walter Arbib has arranged for a shipment of $400,000 worth of antibiotics and other…
It would be nice to think that I’ve changed the course of history. In my column last week, I criticized the widely used term “convergence plan” as a translation of the Hebrew word hitkansut, which is what Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been calling his scheme of a unilateral withdrawal from most of the…
WASHINGTON — Despite receiving warm embraces in Congress and in the White House this week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert returned home with mounting opposition and a lack of clear American support for his plan to have Israel determine its borders unilaterally. President Bush effusively praised Olmert during a White House meeting Tuesday, and Olmert was…
