We all know by now that the coronavirus pandemic should be viewed with the utmost seriousness. Twelve million people around the world have been sickened by it and 553,000 have succumbed to its ravages. Like the Spanish flu outbreak a century ago, COVID-19 poses an extremely dangerous threat to the health and welfare of even … Read More
White supremacist John Timothy Earnest attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, on the last day of Passover in 2019, killing a 60-year-old congregant and wounding its founding rabbi. In a manifesto posted online, Earnest, 19, invoked an incident that occurred on Easter Sunday in 1475 in the town of Trent. As he wrote, “You are … Read More
It’s no secret that Israel is doing everything in its power to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, but it’s an open question whether Israel was responsible for recent explosions that damaged two Iranian nuclear sites. A spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Behrouz Kamalvandi, disclosed that these blasts caused “significant damage” to advanced equipment, … Read More
Israel and the Soviet Union were enmeshed in an intense clash of arms in the Sinai Peninsula from the end of the 1967 Six Day War until the conclusion of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Soviets poured more than 50,000 advisors, technicians and pilots into this effort on behalf of its defeated Arab ally, … Read More
Ilan Stavans compares his lengthy trip to Latin America a few years ago to an ethnographic expedition undertaken by the fabled folklorist S. Ansky to Eastern Europe in the second decade of the last century. In his Yiddish-language book, The Enemy At His Pleasure, Ansky offered an acute analysis of Jewish life in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine … Read More
Contrary to some expectations, July 1 turned out to be an uneventful day in Israel. It came and went without a much-anticipated announcement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel would unilaterally annex a substantial portion of the West Bank, home to 2.5 million Palestinians and 450,000 Israeli Jews. He had said he would launch … Read More
Roger Van Boxtel, the chief executive officer of the Dutch national railway company, Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), would do well to stop in his tracks and reconsider one of his recent decisions. Last month, NS announced it would donate five million euros ($5.6 million) to four Dutch centers dedicated to combating antisemitism and memorializing the Holocaust, … Read More
Plessy v. Ferguson, a U.S. Supreme Court verdict of immense magnitude, drew little national attention when it was handed down in 1896, but its effects on race relations in the United States were staggering and long-lasting. The ruling, written by Henry Billings Brown, upheld the Separate Car Act, which Louisiana had enacted in 1890 “to … Read More
There was a time in American politics when Israel could usually count more on Democrats than Republicans for understanding and support. But since the accession of Donald Trump to the presidency, the pendulum has swung the other way. In fact, this is a historic process that has actually unfolded incrementally over the decades. A Democratic … Read More
The United Arab Emirates, a conservative, pro-American Arab state, regards Israel as a potential partner, but its willingness to establish formal diplomatic relations with it is constrained by one overwhelming obstacle, the Arab-Israeli dispute. A federation of seven emirates, including Dubai, the UAE has cozied up to Israel in recent years. Two factors account for … Read More