My Israeli-born kids recited Tehillim in kindergarten. Tehillim, the Psalms of David, are background music here in Jerusalem. But they weren’t when I was growing up in mid-20th-century New York. David’s words lived on in my siddur and set to Shlomo Carlebach’s music, but the idea of reciting them on their own, and not during…
“There’s no joy. There isn’t a lot of strength. Everything is dead inside,” said Dina Kit about the emotional experience of losing a child. Kit speaks from personal experience, having lost one son to cancer and another, an Israel Defense Forces soldier, to a terrorist attack. One of the things Kit and other mothers are…
Even in a political culture as poisonous as ours is of late, there’s still something deeply disturbing about the perverse dishonesty of the right-wing attacks on Samantha Power, President Obama’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations. There are so many layers of bad faith at work here that it’s hard to know where to…
Let’s assume that everything we think we know about the recent terror attacks in London and Boston turns out to be true. That the people who carried them out were not actually part of a formal, organized international effort to kill Westerners — that they were not paid a salary by a terror group, or…
President Obama’s big May 23 policy speech on terrorism was one for the history books, but not for the reason you think. It was one of those rare moments in the life of a nation when people rise to debate their future and we discover that everyone — but everyone — is full of baloney….
Israeli intelligence experts, defense mavens and foreign policy gurus should be poring over President Barack Obama’s address to the National Defense University by now. Many of them, one can safely posit, won’t like what they’re reading, in the text and between the lines. And it’s not only because Obama, contrary to conventional wisdom in Israel,…
For many years now, the terrorist organization Hezbollah has been tolerated, if not accepted, in most of Europe. Many European countries looked the other way as Hezbollah raised huge sums of money on the continent and, perhaps in return, Hezbollah largely refrained from doing any of its nasty violent business on European soil. Two recent…
Counterterrorism officials from five U.S. cities met with their counterparts in Israel. Ten officials from five major cities – New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, Calif., Austin, Texas and Houston – met in mid-October with representatives of Israel’s police, the Jerusalem Post reported. The tour focused on “technological and operational advances in counterterrorism,” according to the…
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