Three left-wing candidates endorsed by New York’s anti-Zionist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, won Democratic Party primaries on June 23, upending politics in the city and underscoring Israel’s rapidly declining image and standing in the United States. In what was described as a pro-Palestinian sweep, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier won progressive districts in […]
Iran appears to have won a strategic diplomatic victory over Israel, having succeeded in placing Israel’s current conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon at the center of its talks with the United States to officially terminate their war. During the opening round of U.S.-Iran negotiations in Switzerland on June 21, which was aimed at turning a […]
Germans of mixed race ancestry fared badly in Nazi Germany. Thomas Paul Bernstein was one of them, a half-Jew who barely survived the brutalities of the Third Reich. He and his sister, Barbara, tell their story in Holocaust: German History And Our Half-Jewish Family (Cherry Orchard Books/Academic Studies Press), a book of distinction in terms […]
Donald Trump lambasted the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which placed severe restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. He called it “one of the most incompetently drawn deals I’ve ever seen.” After he unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018, he assured Americans that he would forge a far better deal than his predecessor, […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has learned the hard way that his political relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump comes at a high price. While Trump has often been supportive of Israel, the United States’ chief ally in the Middled East, he has occasionally differed with Netanyahu on such hot button issues as Iran and […]
Israel’s forthcoming general election is due to take place in September or October, and if the pollsters are correct Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fail to capture enough Knesset seats to cobble together yet another right-wing coalition. Public opinion surveys released by the Times of Israel and Channel 12 on June 11 predicted that the […]
There has been a negotiated end to the war in Iran, but the volatile issues that triggered it have yet to be resolved. After nearly three months of arduous negotiations punctuated by periodic armed clashes, the United States and Iran reached a ceasefire agreement within the parameters of a memorandum of understanding on June 14. […]
Has Iran constrained Israel’s freedom of action in Lebanon? That’s the burning question observers have asked following Israel’s latest clashes with Iran on June 7 and June 8. The events that led to these flareups began when Hezbollah, Iran’s chief proxy in the Middle East, fired rockets and drones into the Galilee. Israel then bombed […]
Erno “Zvi” Spiegel is an unsung hero of the Holocaust — a nearly forgotten Hungarian Jew who saved young Jewish twins in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland from looming death. An inmate in the camp since May 1944, he worked for Josef Mengele, the German physician who conducted gruesome medical experiments on twins he […]
Iran’s ballistic missile attacks against Israel on June 7 and June 8 were stunning yet not surprising. Iran — Israel’s arch enemy and Hezbollah’s chief ally in the Middle East — attacked Israel in retaliation for an Israeli air strike in Dahiyeh, a suburb south of Beirut and a Hezbollah stronghold. Israeli aircraft bombed Dahiyeh […]