Yair Lapid, anchor of Israel’s most popular weekend news show, columnist in the best-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot, author, screenwriter and one-time actor, is the self-styled voice of what he calls the “42%.” According to his calculation, this is the proportion of the population that is Jewish, secular and Zionist. It’s a political constituency for which…
Prior to his announcement that he was leaving Israel’s Channel 2 to run for the Knesset, Yair Lapid, a popular Israeli media personality and son of the late Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, must have been encouraged by a Geocartography poll that placed an unnamed, hypothetical party led by him second, with 20 seats, behind only a…
The Tzipi Livni who spoke before a small, private dinner on Wednesday evening in New York seemed more excitable, passionate and downright worried than she has been in these sort of settings. Barely had the guests invited by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace taken their seats when the leader of Israel’s…
In all the excitement, controversy and dismay related to Israel’s Defense Minister abandoning his party, Labor, and forming a new faction, it seems that many of us overlooked the funny part. As the Forward reported here, in what many viewed as an act of self-preservation as Labor turned on him, Likud Barak has now set…
Kadima lawmaker Otniel Schneller blamed immigrants to Israel from the Former Soviet Union for the national upsurge in drunk driving. He said that “they brought their drinking habits over from there.” Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat tried to stop him, but Schneller continued on to say that prior to this immigration “the problem of…
In advance of Tuesday’s election in Israel, candidates of various persuasions have shown no shame in cribbing from the storied presidential campaign of Barack Obama — regardless of their ideological similarities or differences with the American president, The Daily Beast reports. The Shas Party, whose constituency traditionally has been composed of Orthodox Sephardic Jews, has…
Kadima leader Tzipi Livni is known for her rather stuffy and humorless image. This week she attempted to shake it. Literally. She tried her best to dance the night away, or at least the precise segment of it scheduled by her publicity people, at a party organized by young Kadima supporters at the super-trendy Tel…
100% of profits support our journalism
