A version of this article originally appeared in New Voices. Picture Naftali Bennett and Bibi Netanyahu meeting in a dark basement under the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and, by the light of a single candle, recommitting themselves to a secret plan to win the hearts and minds of impressionable American youths. This is how I…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry is advancing a plan to send $1 million in emergency aid to Houston’s flood-hit Jewish community. Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett announced the plan Monday, calling it “unprecedented.” His office said the money would go toward repairing and rebuilding local schools, synagogues and Jewish community centers damaged by tropical…
Amid rising fear in American Jewish communities due to the increased visibility of neo-Nazis and other anti-Semitic groups, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs minister admitted in an interview published Sunday that the Jewish state could only go so far to keep Jews safe. “We view ourselves as having a certain degree of responsibility for every Jew in…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A rabbi who is a leader of the Jewish Home Party has threatened to leave the party because a spokeswoman for its leader, Naftali Bennett, is a lesbian. Rabbi Yisrael Rozen, the head of the Zomet Institute, which researches how technology can be used under Jewish law, on Wednesday resigned from the…
On Saturday evening, July 22, the eighth day of the Temple Mount crisis, Israel’s education minister Naftali Bennett, head of the religious-nationalist Jewish Home party, made a condolence visit to the family that had lost three of its members in a horrific stabbing attack the day before. It was not exactly a shiva call, as…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A Knesset committee has approved a bill that would make it difficult to divide Jerusalem in a peace deal. The Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved an amendment to an existing Basic Law that would require a majority of at least 80 Knesset members to pass a decision to give up land in…
The man who heads the right flank of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Israeli governing coalition, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, issued on Sunday what amounts to an extraordinary public acknowledgment: that a peace agreement with the Palestinians is possible — and indeed that negotiators had come within “a hair’s breadth” of concluding an agreement several…
The day of the U.S. election, Jewish Home Chair Naftali Bennett said that President Trump’s win represented the “end of the era of a Palestinian state.” But now with Trump about to land in Israel for his first diplomatic visit, Bennett is sounding decidedly less confident of that outcome amid reports that Trump wants to…
