Rabbi David Lau’s condemnation this week of Naftali Bennett’s visit to the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan was shortsighted and inaccurate in many ways. Most close to home for me, it denigrated the vital work we are doing at Schechter Manhattan to nurture positive Jewish identity in our students, the future leaders of the American…
Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, David Lau, criticized Education Minister Naftali Bennett for visiting a Conservative Jewish Solomon Schechter school while in the United States. On Wednesday, Lau told the haredi Kol Hai radio station that Bennett, chair of the religious Zionist Jewish Home party and a modern Orthodox Jew, should have conferred with an Orthodox…
The Jewish Home party has filed a police complaint over threatening comments posted to chairman Naftali Bennett’s Facebook page. The posts call for violence against Bennett, Israel’s education minister, and other politicians with the right-wing, pro-settler party, accusing them of being murderers. The comments amount to incitement, the complaint said, according to reports Wednesday. They…
Right now, after finishing seven weeks of infuriating, hairpin coalition negotiations, Benjamin Netanyahu must be wondering what would be a worse fate for the impossibly shaky and extremist government he’s assembled: that it collapses the moment some disgruntled back-bencher decides to walk out — or that it survives and leads Israel into as-yet unimagined recesses…
In case you missed it: The No. 1 best comedy line of the weekend came from one of our best deadpan straight men, House Speaker John Boehner, Republican of Ohio. It came during a Sunday interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” They were talking about the Israeli prime minister’s flip-flop on…
With four days left before Israelis go to the polls, the battleground is noticeably shifting from the fight for voters’ ballots to the fight over the shape of the next governing coalition. Specifically, the battle has begun for position within the expected Yitzhak Herzog government. And the way things are shaping up, the person in…
Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party were backpedaling furiously this weekend to dispel an unwelcome image of diplomatic flexibility, after a negotiating document surfaced in which the Israeli prime minister appeared to offer sweeping concessions to the Palestinians on 1967 borders, return of refugees, Palestinian presence in the Jordan Valley and some undefined Palestinian claim…
(Reuters) — Young and ambitious, with a ready smile and a quick wit, Israeli far right leader Naftali Bennett is on a mission to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. If, as widely expected, he takes on defense or another key portfolio after next month’s election, that mission will take a big step closer…
