In mid-August, 127 Americans flew to Israel with the intention of joining the Israel Defense Forces. They arrived at Ben-Gurion International Airport to a boisterous and well-organized welcome, complete with a live band, balloon hats, and a speech delivered personally by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photos of would-be soldiers joyously dancing in the airport arrival…
On Memorial Day 2016, the Forward salutes the Americans who have died in recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan — and reminds readers of the dozens of Jewish servicememebers who perished. Here is a look back at how we have covered their wrenching stories. Of the more than 6,800 Americans who have died in Iraq…
The World Without You By Joshua Henkin Pantheon, 336 pages, $25.95 Leo Frankel is dead. He died on July 4, 2004, while on a reporting trip in Iraq. The action of “The World Without You” takes place over the weekend of his unveiling, in 2005, and while Leo is, in some ways, at the center…
In her modest, shack-like home in southern Israel, my great aunt Toya served some of the best food I’ve ever tasted. After my Iraqi grandmother, Rachel, passed away, her cousin Toya (Victoria) Levy took it upon herself to fill void in our hearts and in our bellies. One of her duties was to prepare tbeet…
Our world has rarely seemed so impenetrably mysterious as it has these past days. The spectacle of hysterical weeping and wailing in North Korea follows hard on the heels of 10,000 protesters marching in downtown Cairo in outrage over photos of soldiers dragging women by the hair and stomped on them, stripping them half-naked in…
The recent intimations that Israel is planning a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are not likely to lead to any such action anytime soon. More likely, they reflect an attempt to generate stronger international sanctions, coming as they did just as Vienna’s International Atomic Energy Agency was about to release a report confirming Israel’s…
Two more dead. One in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. Since earlier this year, when the Forward published a sorrowful package of profiles of the 37 Jewish men and women in the United States military who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade, two more names now must be added to the list….
T’beet, a chicken stuffed with rice and spices and cooked buried in more rice and spices, was the traditional Sabbath lunch of the Babylonian Jews of Iraq for generations. I say “was” because apart from the older generation of exiled Iraqi Jews, like my mother and a few relatives, very few people make this dish…
