If Tel Aviv weren’t an Israeli city with a Jewish majority, usually only noticed abroad in relation to conflict and terrorism, its Mediterranean ambience would be better appreciated. With 318 sunny days a year, beaches, and a “la dolce vita” way of life, it reminds one of cities in Italy and Greece. Even in mid-November, […]
While in Tel Aviv this week, we visited a former colleague of mine, whom I knew from the time when I worked as a journalist at the Washington Jewish Week in the 1980s.Judith Colp Rubin, a native New Yorker and graduate of the University of Chicago, has been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East […]
Jerusalem is today known as a religiously conservative city, unlike liberal and trendy Tel Aviv and secular Haifa.But even the Holy City has a radical past. It is, after all, home of the Hebrew University. And many of the city’s radicals and bohemians used to gather at one spot, at 27 King George Street — […]
I’m sending this article from Jerusalem, the city that has doubtless had more written about it than any place of comparable size anywhere on the globe. Visitors and tourists know about the sites holy to the three Abrahamic faiths, the more recent Israeli points of interest, and the various museums. There’s arguably more to see […]
This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the seminal events of the 20th century: the release of the Balfour Declaration. There are few documents in Middle Eastern history which have had as much influence as the Balfour Declaration. It was sent as a 67-word statement contained within the short letter addressed by British […]
In the recent Kurdish referendum on independence, the citizens of the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq, to no one’s surprise, voted overwhelmingly, at 91.83 percent, to create a sovereign state. In the run-up to the vote, opponents of the move tried to smear the Kurds by claiming they were, in effect, in the pay […]
In 2004, I co-edited a book, De Facto States: The Quest for Sovereignty, that was to include a chapter on Iraqi Kurdistan. The person asked to write it didn’t come through, though, so it wasn’t included. Today such an article would be an absolute necessity. It’s been a long time coming, but on September 25 […]
For two and a half years, Yemen has been torn by a civil war in which its internationally-recognized government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, backed by a coalition supported by the United States and Britain, is trying to roll back the Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels who control most of northern Yemen, including the capital Sana’a. […]
In Myanmar (Burma), Buddhist animosity toward an ethno-religious Bengali Muslim minority, the Rohingya, has led to massive violence. The Rohingya, who number some 1.3 million people, less than five percent of the country’s population, live mainly in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine State, adjacent to neighboring Muslim Bangladesh. Most were stripped of their citizenship under a […]
Some Varsovians call it, caustically, “Stalin’s wedding cake.” Others have wanted it razed to the ground. It sits plopped in the middle of the city, looking like a 1930s-era building, and is now surrounded by modern office towers. In its own way it looks sort of kooky. It was Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s “gift to […]