Dear Natalie (If I may), In recent days, I have followed closely your decision not to appear at a prize ceremony in Israel and your statement about it. Your decision was important to me not only because I am Palestinian, but because I realized we have some things in common, you and I. I was…
It’s now been a month. An entire month of Palestinian organized, initiated and funded violence at the border with Gaza. What began with a promise of non-violence has cost some 35 Palestinian lives and hundreds of reported casualties. But the leaders of Hamas keep promising us that the worst is still ahead. Indeed, we are…
At the tail end of the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II, the 1939 New York World’s Fair offered weary, anxious Americans an escape from the dismal present into an ecstatic future. Over the fair’s six-month span, 44 million people descended on a former ash dump in Flushing, Queens, to experience…
This week, Barnard University’s students voted to divest from Israel. The news was shocking, not least because Barnard has the highest population percentage of Jews of any secular college in America. With a Jewish population of 33%, Jews could have voted down the motion had they all shown up and supported Israel. Where were those…
As we approach the eve of the holy holiday of 4/20, we wanted to take a moment to mark this auspicious occasion. Because marijuana is a central part of Jewish life — in fact, it always has been, as Madison Margolin writes, all the way from ancient Israel to the shtetl. Jews relate to this…
Among its various achievements, the 1943 thriller “Le Corbeau” (or “The Raven”) earned its director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, a lifetime ban from filmmaking. Clouzot had made his caustic movie during the height of the Nazi occupation of France for a German-controlled production company called Continental Films, which had been created by Joseph Goebbels to pacify French…
In a popular Syrian news group on Facebook, a Syrian activist recently shared a video of Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teenager in jail for slapping an Israeli soldier. Across the world, Tamimi has become a cause celebré, a symbol of the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation. But when the activist posted the Amnesty International video…
The State of Israel is 70 years old, well past its early growing pains; it is strong, confident and distinctive. North American Jewry is still here — strong, confident and distinctive in its own fashion. But the relationship between the world’s two largest Jewish communities is growing more and more strained, and, on this milestone…
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