This is the Forward’s coverage of Israel, the Jewish state in the Middle East founded in 1948.
Israel
The Latest
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The Schmooze Israeli Attorney Launches Campaign Against Overcharging
Shopping in Israel can be an intensely irritating experience. There’s the line-jumping, the willingness of checkout staff to keep customers waiting while they chat with each other or on cell phones, and the hard-sell for things you don’t need just before you pay. Then there’s the overcharging – not the while-you’re-not-looking kind, but the we’re-waving-it-in-your-face-but-you-can’t-protest…
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Food I Can’t Believe There’s No Butter
Around October people in Israel started to notice that the usual 227-gram blocks of butter were becoming more difficult to come by. By November, even the smaller, marked up 100-gram packs were scarce. And before the start of December, supermarket shelves were wiped clean of butter, meagerly offering margarine and other whipped oil products as…
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Food Preserving Iraqi Jewish Heritage, One Kubbeh at a Time
Between 1941 and the 1970s the majority of Iraq’s Jewish population faced institutionalized violence and persecution in their homeland, forcing them to flee. Today, only a handful of Jews remain in Iraq, down from an estimated 150,000 in 1948. For the Iraqi Jews who sought refuge in Israel (some sources say up to 90%), their…
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Opinion Joint Ban by 300 Israeli Rabbis on Renting Homes to Arabs Draws Several Press Releases in Protest
The conflict between the Jewish state and the democratic state is growing apace. The rabbis’ letter forbidding Jews to rent homes to non-Jews (meaning, mostly, Arabs) is attracting a steadily growing list of signatories. As of Thursday night it had about 300 rabbis signed on, according to a report on Israel National News, the English…
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The Schmooze Woman’s Odd Theory for Why Israel Blaze Happened
It’s been a week since the devastating fire in Northern Israel began, and already we have self-appointed experts telling us the “message” of the blaze. The latest theory is that it’s meant to focus people on… the campaign to free Jonathan Pollard. Pollard started serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison in 1987 for…
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The Schmooze Will Leonardo DiCaprio Convert to Judaism?
How does Leonardo DiCaprio look in a yarmulke? We might get a chance to find out. The (UK) Daily Mail reports the 36-year-old, Catholic-born megastar may convert to Judaism as a step toward nuptials with his Israeli supermodel girlfriend Bar Refaeli. “A source” apparently told the Daily Mail that “Leo’s sudden intense interest in Israel,…
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Opinion Wikileaks Back Israel’s Iran Claims. Sunni Arabs Share the Fear. So Why Don’t They Work Together? Well…
A news analysis by Yaakov Katz in today’s Jerusalem Post makes the very sensible point that the Wikileaks super-dump evidently vindicates Israel’s arguments that the Iranian nuclear project is everybody’s problem, not just Israel’s. Progressives and isolationists have been claiming more or less since the Iraq invasion in 2003 that the constant brouhaha over an…
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The Schmooze Embracing Judaism in Indonesia
A 62-foot menorah graces a mountaintop. Israeli flags flutter from taxi stands. The local synagogue shines after a government-sponsored renovation. The images don’t immediately bring Indonesia to mind. But a tiny northern outpost in the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population “has become the unlikely setting for increasingly public displays of pro-Jewish sentiments,” reports…
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