He’s the budget-conscious, business-friendly mayor of his country’s most cosmopolitan city. Amid a building boom that has transformed the city’s skyline, critics accuse him of abetting gentrification and pricing out lower-income residents. Meanwhile, at a time when concern over illegal immigrants is playing out in a big way on the national political stage, he has…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis speaks with assistant managing editor Larry Cohler-Esses and staff writers Gal Beckerman and Nathan Guttman about what motivated Richard Goldstone to declare in a Washington Post opinion piece that he no longer believed that Israel had a policy of targeting Palestinian civilians during its 2008-2009 military incursion into…
In early 2005, porn producer and actor Ashley Gasper realized that someone was bootlegging his films. Counterfeit copies of “Jules Jordan’s Flesh Hunter 6” and “Jules Jordan: Feeding Frenzy 2,” among other titles, were showing up among the DVDs being returned to his distributor. According to a recent decision issued by the U.S. Court of…
When Richard Goldstone returned home to South Africa last May for his grandson’s bar mitzvah — an event that he was almost unable to paticipate in because of protests planned against him — he also attended a separate meeting whose details were kept secret until now. In the wake of Goldstone’s bombshell retraction of a…
After being a target for political attacks during the past year, progressive nongovernmental organizations in Israel are now bracing for another hit: the loss of one of their largest donors. The Ford Foundation, which has provided $40 million to civil society NGOs in Israel since 2003, will not resume its funding for programs in Israel…
The contending sides in Zia-ur-Rahman’s detention case are hardly a surprise. On Rahman’s behalf, the American Civil Liberties Union argues that the 27-year-old Afghan’s indefinite detention by American authorities — without right to counsel or judicial review — at Bagram airfield, outside Kabul, violates his right to due process. On the other side, the Pentagon,…
Like his life and his work, Juliano Mer-Khamis’s funeral procession cut across boundaries: It made its way from Haifa, crossing an Israeli army checkpoint to stop in the West Bank Palestinian town of Jenin and ended up at Kibbutz Ramot Menashe in northern Israel, where the slain filmmaker and actor was laid to rest and…
Jewish social justice guru Jill Jacobs is known for her vocal advocacy work on behalf of society’s most marginalized, including undocumented workers and the poor. Now, as newly appointed executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, she will engage with the most incendiary issue in American Jewish life: public criticism of Israel for its…
We’ve been at the Passover Seder of our friends Helen and Tanny for each of the past dozen years. In addition to being full of good fellowship, spirited singing and delectable food, the Seders feature props illustrating the 10 Plagues that are so startling that, some years, my youngest child runs out of our hosts’…
Naama Shafir, a junior guard, poured in a career-high 40 points to lead the University of Toledo to victory in the Women’s National Invitation Tournament championship. She was crowned the basketball tournament’s MVP. And then she walked about two miles home. Shafir, an Orthodox Jew from Israel, did not want to break the Sabbath. The…
David Bezmozgis’s first novel and follow-up to his much-acclaimed 2004 short story collection, “Natasha,” is about a family in limbo, caught between the world they have left and the “Free World,” of the book’s title, to which they are headed. They are the Krasnanskys, Soviet Jews, who like Bezmozgis and his family, left the Soviet…
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