President Joe Biden made an impassioned and important point a few days ago in a speech to Howard University’s graduating class. Warning that malevolent elements in the United States are attempting to roll back generations of racial progress, he correctly classified this kind of bigotry as a phenomenon passed on from one generation to the […]
Arranged marriages, a common occurrence among ultra-Orthodox Jews and traditional Muslims, apparently rarely break up. As one of the chief characters in Skekhar Kapur’s appealing romantic comedy, What’s Love Got To Do With It?, points out, only six percent of these unions fail. “You grow to love the person you’re with,” he says. The person […]
Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, rarely a month has gone by without an upsurge of fresh fighting. These clashes have pitted Israel against Iranian-backed Palestinian factions in Gaza whose long-term goal is to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine. […]
The first Palestinian Arab rebellion in Palestine broke out in 1936 and flickered out in 1939. It would be the final revolt of its kind during the British Mandate era, but hardly the last Palestinian uprising. Two more revolts erupted long after the birth of Israel, the first in 1987 and the second in 2000. […]
Imad Mughniyeh, a founder and principal of Hezbollah, lived and died by the sword. A notorious terrorist, he masterminded a string of suicide bombing attacks in the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans, Israelis and Argentinian Jews and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon. Before the September 11, 2001 […]
Israel is riven by profound political fault lines pitting Jewish liberals and moderates against conservatives and ultra-nationalists and secular Jews against haredim. Israelis are a fractious lot, though they tend to be united in times of emergencies and wars. These tensions emerge in The Lesson, a thoughtful, jolting and disturbing six-part Israeli drama directed by […]
Much to its dishonor, the Polish government recently conducted an orchestrated campaign against a respected Polish scholar who disagrees with its skewed nationalistic narrative of the Holocaust. The object of its wrath, Barbara Engelking, is the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and the author […]
Matchmaker and dating coach Aleeza Ben-Shalom offers sound advice to her Orthodox, Conservative and Reform clients: “Date them until you hate them,” “Never give up,” and abide by the golden rule that “too much analysis leads to paralysis.” Ben-Shalom, an American who lives in the Israeli town of Pardes Hanna with her husband and five […]
Antwerp, the world’s diamond capital, looms large in Netflix’s crime thriller, Rough Diamonds, a joint production from Israel and Belgium. The diamond trade in rough and polished stones in Antwerp is dominated by ultra-Orthodox Jews. The Wolfsons, a fictitious haredi family, are at the center of this intriguing, mostly satisfying eight-part series, which unfolds in […]
Trips by two high-ranking Republican politicians to Israel in the past week add credence to a recent Gallup survey that Republicans in the United States are more likely to support Israel than Democrats. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and a likely contender […]