A nonpartisan commission appointed by President Bush has completed a study of the reasons that we went to war in Iraq. It concluded its research with a lengthy statement that scourges the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency for misinforming the president on the true situation in Iraq and for feeding…
For one measure of the toxic, partisan atmosphere in the Republican-controlled Senate, consider the predicament of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman. In 1995, the arch-centrist joined a fellow Democrat, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, in proposing a rule change that would have kept the 60 votes presently required for “cloture” of a Senate filibuster, but decreased…
How does a rabbi feel when he meets the pope? As a 10th-generation rabbi, that’s something I thought was about as likely to happen to me as playing the romantic lead in a Julia Roberts movie. My world is the ivory tower of Jewish academia, not the Vatican. The people I’m used to seeing with…
GULU, Uganda — It is much harder, Nelson Oyet explains in a monotone, to hack a child with a machete than to shoot him with a gun. He is 16. Jennifer Atira recounts in a halting voice how she was given as a “wife,” at 13, to a commander twice her age who would beat…
On his 50th yahrzeit, Yosef Rolnick was featured in the Forverts on the pages of Pearls of Yiddish Poetry. He was known in his time (1879-1955) as one of the Di Junge poets. But in one major respect he was different from most of the others who focused on social, economic and political subjects. Rolnick…
WASHINGTON — Last week the Bush administration’s point man on the peace process, Elliott Abrams, came to Jerusalem to demand a halt to Israel’s expansion of West Bank settlements. The directive reflected three decades of American opposition to settlement expansion, but marked a radical transformation on Abrams’s part. Just four years ago, as an out-of-government…
WASHINGTON — As they prepare for separate meetings with President Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas are battling to secure White House endorsements of their conflicting positions on West Bank settlements. Sharon, who will travel to Crawford, Texas, on April 11 for his first meeting at Bush’s private ranch, wants…
TEL AVIV — Tensions between the religious settler community and the political mainstream reached into the army’s General Staff and boiled over this week, in an unusual confrontation that could be a sign of things to come as the July date nears for disengagement from Gaza. The eruption came at a meeting of senior officers…
Urged on by conservative provocateur David Horowitz, lawmakers in several states are pushing legislation requiring unprecedented government oversight of teaching on college campuses. In Florida last week, a key legislative committee approved the so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” in an 8-2 vote. The decision came after the bill’s Republican sponsor inveighed against “leftist totalitarianism” among…
Schiavo Set-to: Some Connecticut liberals are seizing on Senator Joseph Lieberman’s stance approving of congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo matter to press their case that Lieberman is out of touch with Nutmeg State voters. Lieberman, one of only a few Jewish lawmakers to approve of Congress’s bid to override the Florida courts and restore…
Sidney Eisenshtat, one of America’s leading synagogue architects, died March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 90 years old. Eisenshtat was a prolific architect in Southern California, and an influential architect of modern synagogues. He graduated from the University of Southern California ‘s School of Architecture in 1935 and maintained his architectural practice in Los…
די „שלום־עליכם לעקציע“ וועט מען קענען הערן אויפֿן אָרט אָדער דורך דער אינטערנעץ.
