Many Ashkenazi Jews know only a few basic geographical facts about their ancestors: They came from Poland, but when it was Russia. Their great-grandparents hailed from Bulgaria — or was it Romania? A number of Jews have turned to direct-to-consumer ancestry services like 23andMe and Ancestry.com for better answers, but they have gotten nowhere. This…
If you are Jewish and you feel drawn somehow to celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, there are more than a dozen good reasons why. St. Patrick’s Day and Purim typically appear on the calendar within a few weeks of each other. In the same way that on Purim one is encouraged to drink to the point…
February was one of the bloodiest months since the start of the Syrian civil war, seven years ago this Thursday. All throughout the past month, the Assad regime, along with pro-Iranian militias and Russia, escalated their assault on the rebel-held eastern Ghouta suburb of Damascus. Ghouta, the last pocket of the Syrian insurgency threatening the…
President Trump yesterday dismissed his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson — via tweet. While Tillerson was never a “Trumpian” in the manner of Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, Republican foreign policy stalwarts Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice recommended him for his stellar career as a business executive with long-standing ties to President Vladimir Putin of…
Over the past couple of weeks, a familiar character has been haunting Twitter: Louis Farrakhan, leader of Nation of Islam. A few weeks ago, Farrkhan gave his annual Savior’s Day Address, which was laden with the anti-Semitic comments he is known for. The “powerful Jews are my enemy,” he said, “responsible for all of this…
Clayton Swisher has produced a film for Al Jazeera that used a Jewish undercover journalist pretending to be a Zionist to infiltrate and report on pro-Israel organizations. Now, in an op ed in these pages, Swisher is trying to use me to provide a “qualified seal of approval” for the unfairly one-sided video. But he…
Less than two weeks before the Israeli energy giant Delek Drilling announced a $15 billion deal to pump natural gas to Egypt, one of its board members, Malcolm Hoenlein, told a newspaper that the United States should be “standing up for” Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, despite his troubling human rights record. “You can criticize…
Many years ago, I spoke at a Reform synagogue in Chicago about the Palestinian experience. It was the height of the Second Intifada, and during the Question and Answer session, a woman asked me with a concerned look, “Why don’t Palestinian mothers love their children?” Confused, I was sure I had misheard the question. “I’m…
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