HERZLIYA PITUAH, Israel — In Israel’s war on drugs, Ronny Douek is fighting on the front lines. As the new chairman of the Israel Anti-Drug Authority, Douek faces a formidable challenge. The Israel Anti-Drug Authority estimates that there are 20,000 drug addicts in Israel, among 300,000 periodic drug users. Ten percent of Israeli teenagers use…
Ruling Helps Converts Those who convert to Judaism after immigrating to Israel can receive automatic citizenship, Israel’s high court ruled. Monday’s ruling, which capped seven years of deliberations, was seen as a victory for those who move to Israel and then convert abroad, usually under the auspices of Reform or Conservative rabbis. Until this week’s…
TEL AVIV — Israel’s military intelligence chief warned the Cabinet this week that America’s mounting troubles in Iraq might prompt it to seek broader international backing and pay for it with the “Israeli coin” of forced concessions that Israel can ill afford. The intelligence chief, Major General Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, told the Cabinet that Israel could…
A bipartisan group of 17 senators, including Hillary Clinton, a New York Democrat, and Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, came together last week to chastise the Department of Justice for its handling of the so-called “Gold Train” case. The Justice Department has fought at every turn against the federal lawsuit brought by Hungarian Holocaust survivors,…
The recent scandals about the maltreatment of prisoners in Iraq have raised the question of whether such wartime captives have any rights. According to the Geneva Convention on the prisoners of war, they do. And the rights they have would have made impossible the hair-raising abuses they suffered at the hands of their American jailers….
Coming from another Frenchman, the argument hardly would seem surprising: The war in Iraq was a tragic mistake that derailed the war on terror and damaged America’s image to a point where it now needs a major intellectual, moral and political shake-up to restore its credibility. But when Bernard-Henri Levy, France’s most prominent “anti-anti-American,” laments…
WASHINGTON — Underscoring an intensifying effort to confront its troubled past, Poland has signed an agreement with the United States to preserve and restore historic Jewish sites in Poland. The agreement, signed last month in Washington, is the latest in a series of accords America has signed with European governments since 1992 to preserve Jewish…
Jews have been pre-eminently an urban people, perhaps since the Diaspora created Alexandria as a major Jewish center, and this has been true of American Jews, too. We celebrate the 350th anniversary of the establishment of the American Jewish community by marking its beginning in New Amsterdam — New York City as it was to…
‘Have you read ‘The Da Vinci Code’?” a friend asked me recently about the runaway best seller. “No,” I said. “Is it any good?” “It’s only the worst novel I’ve ever read,” my friend said. “But you might get a language column out of it. There’s a chapter there about an ancient Hebrew code called…
Once more, Stanley Siegelman returns to “Der Vinkl” to tickle our funny bones. His present effort is difficult to “trump,” in part because his subject is no less than the Donald himself and his repetitive “husbandry.” (Is the third time the charm?) What follows are Siegelman’s Yiddish and English versions of a new poem, “The…
A few weeks ago, my wife and I attended a wedding in Israel — the exact ambience of which I couldn’t put a finger on. The bride and groom and their families both came from what is known in Hebrew as the dati-le’umi — the “national religious” community — the closest American Jewish equivalent of…
