The Central Intelligence Agency offers guidelines for its operatives using false identities to get through a “secondary screening” at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, according to a secret CIA document uploaded to WikiLeaks. The document, which is titled “CIA Assessment on Surviving Secondary Screening at Airports While Maintaining Cover” and dated September 2011, was uploaded…
● Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for Sovereignty, 1933-1939 By Monty Penkower, Touro College Press, 348 pages, $39 Monty Noam Penkower, in the latest of his fine works on the genesis of the State of Israel, examines in detail the history of 1930s Palestine. But counterintuitively, Penkower’s context for “Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for…
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book By Peter Finn and Petra Couvée Pantheon, 368 pages, $26.95 The Russian Jewish poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was most celebrated by his compatriots for his lyric collections such as “My Sister, Life” and translations of plays by Shakespeare, Calderón and Schiller….
Malca Fein is a fit, sharp, outspoken, perfectly groomed octogenarian with a just a hint of an accent. But get her talking about the past and the fiery Zionist freedom fighter burns through her grandmotherly facade. At the age of 16, Malca, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1925 and now makes her home…
Israel narrowed its civilian air corridor on Tuesday and said takeoffs and landings at Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv may be delayed by its Gaza air offensive. The Israel Airports Authority said no flights had been canceled at Ben-Gurion, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Gaza, as result of the hostilities, but takeoffs…
Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul By Daniel Gordis Schocken, 320 pages, $27.95. Menachem Begin was one of the more complex personalities in Zionist history. Certainly, he was among the most controversial, and his story has been oft-told. Amos Perlmutter’s 1987 “The Life and Times of Menachem Begin” was conceived as a political biography,…
Purim falls this year on March 16, and St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. It appears that Jews will be nursing their hangovers on Monday morning just as the Irish are getting to work on theirs. What’s significant, year after year, is that the two peoples that did so much to define modern America have…
Ariel Sharon in Knesset, preparing his speech for opening of summer session, May 7, 2001 / Getty Images Amid the outpouring of tributes to Ariel Sharon following his death, a few seem particularly noteworthy for their unexpected insights — some into the life and character of Sharon, others into the character of the writers. Chemi…
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