Google and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding in which the tech giant agreed to provide technological services to the Israeli government. Under the agreement signed Tuesday by Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Google Israel CEO Meir Brand, Google will help improve e-government services and open government, as well as support Israeli start-ups. Israel reportedly…
Ultra-Orthodox Holocaust survivors at Zeilsheim DP camp in Germany, preparing to settle at Hafetz Haim, the first Haredi kibbutz, circa 1947 (Yad Vashem) On the eve of Hanukkah, while the eyes of the world were fixed on the impending demise of one human rights champion, Nelson Mandela, and the sudden, unexpected emergence of another, Pope…
Last June, Jane Eisner participated in a private roundtable discussion at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem about Israel’s Jewish identity. What came out of the talks was the sense that Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora face a similar challenge — how to be a modern people in a modern world while holding…
Israel’s ministry of religious services, headed by economics minister Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home party, has created a new Jewish Identity Administration in an “effort to increase national awareness of Jewish identity,” says a report in Yeshiva World News. Haaretz says its job is to “instill Jewish values” in the general public. The administration…
It was like a return from the dead today at Ben Gurion Airport’s Terminal 1. Ever since it was replaced by a newer terminal a decade ago, it has been a graveyard of abandoned conveyor belts, gaps where vending machines used to be, and check-in desks for a couple of budget airlines that can’t afford…
This horrifying Halloween comic takes aim at a Zionist science experiment gone hideously wrong. Check out a video on Eli’s Halloween comic from last year: Eli Valley is the Forward’s artist in residence for 2011–2012. His website is www.evcomics.com and you can follow him at twitter.com/elivalley.
Romantic rehabilitations of Jewish history’s most notorious heretic, Baruch Spinoza, seem — like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) — to be without end. German romantics crowned this radical unbeliever a “God-intoxicated man.” Zionists claimed the excommunicant as an ideological ancestor of modern Jewish nationalism. The array of uses and misuses of Spinoza by…
Yitzhak Shamir, former Prime Minister, unrepentant terrorist, fervent nationalist, is gone. Ironically, he may best be remembered as the person who caved before the pressure of President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker and, however reluctantly, participated in an ice-breaking peace conference in Madrid in 1991. Madrid was the first time…
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