The title of Nobody Wants This, a romantic comedy now streaming on Netflix, is ambiguous. It revolves around a liberal American rabbi who falls head-over-heels in love with a secular woman who happens to be a Christian but who is lukewarm toward organized religion. Given the interfaith nature of their relationship, viewers are bound to […]
The Middle East was on the abyss following two consequential events of immense magnitude — Israel’s incursion into Lebanon on September 30 and Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel less than a day later. In what was described as a limited and targeted operation, Israel invaded Lebanon for the third time in 46 years, following […]
Iran faces a defining moment of truth following Israel’s audacious assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut on September 27. Nasrallah’s untimely death, a major castastrophe for Hezbollah, was an extremely severe blow to Iran. By all accounts, his removal from the scene elicited shock, anger and sorrow in Tehran. In one devastating stroke, […]
In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 massacre in southern Israel, pro-Hamas Palestinian demonstrators and their supporters condemned Israel as a “colonial settler state.” This false and outrageous claim runs counter to a glaringly inconvenient fact: Jews are indigenous to the Middle East and lived in the Land of Israel long before the emergence of […]
With the game-changing death of its long-serving secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah has been dealt a devastating blow in its long-running armed confrontation with Israel. He was killed on September 27 after Israeli aircraft dropped bunker-busting bombs on Hezbollah’s central headquarters in Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut. Four to six high-rise residential buildings were […]
Israel is fighting a two-front war along its southern and northern borders, battling Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which are Iranian proxies. But far in the east, in Iraq, Israel faces another enemy in the guise of the Islamic Resistance movement, a member of Iran’s fiercely anti-Israel Axis of […]
Israel and Hezbollah have boxed themselves into a tight corner as the cross-border conflict in Lebanon and the Galilee intensifies and approaches the magnitude of an all-out war. In the past few days, both sides have hammered each other ferociously and relentlessly, with the scale of the fighting having reached the level of the 2006 […]
When I learned that Grace Feuerverger had written her memoir, I was intrigued. What could she possibly say? I wondered. Full disclosure: I have known Grace, my oldest friend’s sister, sporadically since 1958, when she was eight years old. Yet in virtually every respect, Grace — a quiet, soft-spoken and reclusive girl — was practically […]
Donald Trump has been spouting verbal diarrhea of late. Speaking at two Jewish campaign events in the last few days, the former U.S. president and Republican Party presidential nominee claimed that American Jews would be mostly to blame if he lost November’s election to his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “If I don’t win […]
Toward the end of the 1990s, I interviewed Moshe Katsav, who was then Israel’s minister of tourism in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government. Little did I know that he would soon be the president of Israel, a position he held from 2000 to 2007. Born in Iran, Katsav immigrated to Israel, along with his […]