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After Slow Start, U.N. Envoy Turns Feisty
To most American Jewish groups, John Bolton is the stand-up guy they had long hoped to see confronting anti-Israel bias in America’s name at the United Nations. To U.N. diplomats, the ambassador is living up to his reputation as a hard-nosed conservative whose contempt for the world body is becoming more visible by the day….
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Reform, Conservative Chiefs Praise Rice
WASHINGTON — In an effort to defend Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice against allegations of heavy-handedness in brokering an Israeli-Palestinian border-crossing deal, the heads of America’s two largest synagogue movements are calling on members of the House of Representatives to sign a letter commending her efforts. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform…
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Measuring the Seismic Political Shifts in Jerusalem
The dramatic events that have shaken the Israeli political establishment in the run-up to national elections next March have been called an earthquake by many. First Amir Peretz staged an upset victory over Shimon Peres to take control of the Labor Party. Then Ariel Sharon parted ways with the far-right politicians in Likud to form…
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Texas Vote Flap Fuels Gerrymander Charge
The congressional district of a high-ranking Jewish Democrat is at the center of a dispute over whether a reapportionment plan pushed by Texas Republicans illegally diluted minority voting strength. The Dallas-Fort Worth district, which Rep. Martin Frost represented from 1978 to 2004, was eliminated in 2003 by Republicans working on behalf of then-House majority leader…
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Keep Marwan Barghouti Behind Bars
On this page last week, Yossi Beilin posited that convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti is the one Palestinian leader ready and able to fight Hamas (“Free Marwan Barghouti To Counter Power of Hamas,” December 2). Barghouti, however, would seem an unlikely candidate to take on that militant Islamist group. On January 22, 1995, after Hamas massacred…
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Rule Roe v. Wade Inadmissable In Alito’s Confirmation Hearings
The fight over Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is, as expected, heating up in anticipation of his pending confirmation hearings in January. And equally as expected, regrettably, the abortion issue is again looming so large that it is crowding everything else off stage. The theatrics over Alito began last week with the public release of…
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Kadima!
So Ariel Sharon’s new party is called Kadima. For a while, it was touch and go: Some of his political advisers wanted Ah.rayut Le’umit or “National Responsibility.” But “Kadima” was deemed catchier and won the day. In Israel, the decades in which parties had dry, politically descriptive names — e.g., Mapai, an acronym for The…
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Jerusalem Wary Of Bush Vision For Arab World
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration’s promise three years ago that toppling Saddam Hussein would trigger a chain reaction of democratic reform in the Arab world drew a half-joking reply from an Israeli diplomat in Washington. “Let’s just hope,” the diplomat then quipped, “that these domino blocks don’t all fall on us.” Since then, the Bush…
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Remembering Both Jerusalem and Gaza Beneath the Wedding Canopy
In almost all respects, Aryeh Gottlieb’s Israeli wedding late last month was a standard Orthodox affair. The bride and groom were separated for a week beforehand; the ceremony took place under a chupah in a Jerusalem banquet hall, and the men and women danced — unmixed — until well into the night. And then there…
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Probe of Shul Group Had N.Y. Crimebuster’s Office in Tangles
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, renowned for his jousts with the titans of corporate America, recently saw his own office tied in knots and thrown into turmoil during a three-year investigation into a small Orthodox synagogue organization. The group, the National Council of Young Israel, came under scrutiny in 1999 after applying for a…
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Jewish Paganism: Oxymoron or Innovation?
I was skinny-dipping in the mud springs on the shores of the Dead Sea with Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi, a longhaired renegade kabbalist who runs a commune in the Judean Desert. We were enveloped by the softest, silkiest mud I’ve ever felt — it was like moving through thick cream. Then the rabbi told me to…
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