My first visit to South Africa, and the impressions were jarring. I grew up in liberal America, where apartheid was a curse and a cause rather than a way of life. I knew very few South Africans, Jewish or otherwise. And then I moved to Israel, and then Nelson Mandela whooshed to president from prisoner,…
A friend wrote in last week to dispute my critique of Israeli judge Edmond Levy’s settlements report. Levy claimed the West Bank isn’t “occupied” under international law, and therefore settlements aren’t illegal. I wrote that while his interpretation squares with the language of the relevant treaties, not one nation in the world accepts it, so…
Benjamin Netanyahu has a bad habit of pretending he’s Houdini — sticking his head in a noose, scaring everyone half to death, then wiggling free at the last minute. The difference is that Houdini’s viewers got to watch from their seats, while Netanyahu’s audience is stuck inside the noose with him. And the noose gets…
Alice Walker, author of “The Color Purple,” refused to authorize a Hebrew translation of her prize-winning work, citing what she called Israel’s “apartheid state.” In a June 9 letter to Yediot Books, Walker said she would not allow the publication of the book into Hebrew because “Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the…
Myriad hypotheses have been floated already about what compelled Goldman Sachs executive director Greg Smith to write the New York Times op-ed that shot around the globe this week. Smith’s broadside against Goldman’s “toxic and destructive” culture has been depicted as the ranting of a disgruntled employee, the “objection of the underclass of younger bankers…
Ali Abunimah was limping as he left Olin Sang Auditorium at Brandeis University in late February. The keynote speaker at the first Israeli Apartheid Week at the Jewish-sponsored school had a torn meniscus, and his doctor had ordered him to lay off the pain pills in advance of his upcoming surgery. “It is hard to…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with Forward Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman about the odd collection of groups that make up the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Then, with Israel Apartheid Week in full swing, Forward fellow Naomi Zeveloff and David A.M. Wilensky, editor of New Voices, stop by to…
This is the week that wasn’t — at least if you planned on attending the colloquium “New sociological, historical and legal approaches to the call for an international boycott: Is Israel an apartheid state?” Scheduled to take place on February 27 and 28 at the University of Paris VIII, the colloquium was quashed last week…
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