When my friend Jonathan Tobin and I began planning last spring for a cross-country synagogue speaking tour in the fall, we fully expected to meet with fireworks over Israeli policy. In fact, that was the point of our tour. At each stop, Jonathan the conservative Commentary blogger and I the liberal Forward columnist would argue…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming speech at a liberal Washington think tank is provoking outrage from some progressives who say that the appearance gives a bipartisan sheen to his government’s right-wing policies. The Israeli leader’s scheduled November 10 appearance at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic left-leaning institution, is seen as an attempt…
These are challenging political times for American Jews. Rarely have loyalties and core values been so unsettled. It’s not just that America and Israel are at odds. Loyalty to the Jewish homeland seems in conflict right now with loyalty to the liberal values of most American Jews, and to the Democratic Party that champions them….
Britain may be on the verge of electing its first affirming Jewish prime minister, Labour Party leader Ed Miliband. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron formally told Queen Elizabeth on Monday that he had dissolved Parliament in advance of the May 7 election, marking the end of his five-year term. But the campaign began in force…
Virginia Senator Tim Kaine is a longtime centrist Democrat from a purple state who has little in common with his party’s liberal wing. But Kaine found himself joining forces with progressives March 3 in boycotting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress. Initially it was Netanyahu’s timing, just two weeks before elections in…
A Canadian Jewish group rebuked the Liberal Party’s leader for comparing Ottawa’s poor record in admitting Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s to the intolerance facing Muslims today. In a speech in Montreal on Monday, Justin Trudeau attacked the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper for deliberately stoking fears and prejudice about Muslims in…
(JTA) — Mario Cuomo, the three-term New York governor who died Thursday, was the rare politician who appealed to the Jewish tent’s opposite poles. A strident liberal with a nuanced understanding of the sense of vulnerability among the deeply religious in a secular society, Cuomo died of heart failure just hours after his son Andrew…
Lital Eliyauh, an Israeli left-wing demonstrator, runs from Israeli tear gas in the West Bank Earlier this week, Jay Michaelson wrote that the Jewish left is in decline and may be dying. As proof, he cited data and statistics, and then went on to provide very few data or statistics. But even if Michaelson had…
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