WASHINGTON — Five U.S. senators introduced a resolution Tuesday applauding private Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives and calling on President Bush and Israeli and Palestinian leaders to embrace them. A similar resolution is expected to be introduced in the House of Representatives early next month, following the symbolic signing ceremony in Geneva of a “virtual” peace accord…
WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans say they plan to push forward with efforts to scrutinize the overseas activities of the Ford Foundation, despite the foundation’s promise last week that it would no longer fund Palestinian groups advocating violence or denying Israel’s legitimacy. “It is still appropriate for there to be ongoing oversight” of the foundation by…
TORONTO — Prominent Israeli personalities such as novelist A.B. Yehoshua and strategic analyst Barry Rubin were among the speakers earlier this month at the Toronto Jewish Book Fair. The biggest draw, however, was a Muslim Canadian author calling for an Islamic Reformation that would purge the Muslim world of antisemitism. Irshad Manji, a Toronto broadcaster…
Hillel Leader Sued Los Angeles freelance journalist Rachel Neuwirth filed a complaint against UCLA Hillel Director Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller and UCLA Hillel, Los Angeles Hillel Council and Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, in the Los Angeles Superior Court on November 20, seeking undisclosed damages for battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction…
In Philip Roth’s 1993 novel “Operation Shylock,” an Israeli book dealer by the name of David Supposnik attempts to solicit support from “Philip Roth” — the character in the novel with the same name as the author — for the publication of the travel diaries of Leon Klinghoffer, the wheelchair-bound passenger murdered by Palestinian terrorists…
Smacking the Saudis: Trying to sound tough on Middle East terrorism, former Vermont governor Howard Dean smacked Saudi Arabia in response to a question from Tom Brokaw during Monday night’s NBC-televised presidential candidate debate in Iowa. Asked by Brokaw whether he considered Saudi Arabia a “friend” or an “enemy,” Dean replied, “Seventy-five years ago, the…
Sunlight & Shadow: The Jewish Experience of Islam By Lucien Gubbay I.B. Tauris, 172 pages, $29.95. * * *| Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians By Francis E. Peters Princeton University Press, 328 pages, $29.95. * * *| The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times Edited by Reeva S….
When two synagogues were blown up this month in Istanbul, Turkey, the government reacted promptly and pointedly. It vowed to get the culprits. It had alternatives. It could have said that the bombing was regrettable but that America’s occupation of Iraq provoked the event. But the Turkish government said nothing of the sort. It took…
In 1999, the photographer Mitch Epstein was 48 years old and living in New York when his mother phoned him with bad news. Two teenage pranksters had burned down a boarded-up apartment building in Holyoke, Mass., owned by Epstein’s father. The flames, fanned by the windy night, had swallowed an entire block of the city’s…
The 20,000 Jews living in this Midwestern city represent a statistical blip in the American Jewish population, but the community registered the equivalent of a 6 on the Richter scale last week in Jerusalem at an international gathering of communal leaders. Kansas City sent a 114-person delegation to the United Jewish Communities General Assembly —…
The German Money By Lev Raphael Leapfrog Press, 200 pages, $14.95. * * *| Lev Raphael, a child of Holocaust survivors, widely admired for mystery novels centered around the hypocrisies and inanities of academic life, is even better represented by his short stories. His debut collection, “Dancing on Tisha B’Av” (St. Martin’s Press, 1991), which…
