Israeli women whose recalcitrant husbands refuse to grant them a divorce, or gett, are known in Hebrew as agunot. Tragically, they are figuratively chained to their husbands, unable to live normally, or restart their lives. This egregious and unjust system, presided over by Orthodox rabbis and tolerated by the Israeli government, has been in existence […]
Recently, The Jewish Journal in Los Angeles published an op-ed piece that ignited a “firestorm of controversy,” as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency succinctly noted. The article, titled “Berkeley Develops Jewish-Free Zones,” was written by Kenneth Marcus, the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. He rightly condemned the University of California’s […]
Only a few days ago, Israel’s proposed maritime border agreement with Lebanon seemed like a sure thing, a beacon of hope in Israel’s adversarial relationship with its northern Arab neighbor. But on October 6, a day after Yom Kippur, a sense of gloom set in following Lebanon’s sudden demand that significant modifications needed to be […]
Suriname, a Dutch colony from 1667 to 1975, borders the Atlantic Ocean to the north and is bounded by French Guiana to the east, English-speaking Guyana to the west and Brazil to the south. The size of the U.S. state of Georgia, this fertile tropical outpost produced sugar, coffee, cacao, cotton and hardwood lumber during […]
As I drove from Toronto to Milton in the Halton Hills, it occurred to me that this was the first time since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that I was actually going somewhere out of town. Covid-19 had upended all my travel plans, large and small, virtually confining my wife and I to our […]
The second season of Tehran, an Apple TV and Israeli state television co-production, lives up to expectations. Tehran, in its debut season, introduced us to a cast of canny Israeli and Iranian spies trying to outwit each other before and after an Israeli air raid intended to wipe out Iran’s nuclear arsenal. In the latest and […]
Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown his true colors yet again as an imperial aggressor bent on crushing a neighboring state and expanding Russia’s boundaries. Yesterday, nine days after calling up roughly 300,000 reservists in a partial mobilization, he announced that Russia would annex four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine heavily populated by ethnic Russians: […]
From Schindler’s List to The Pianist, feature films about the Holocaust have been ubiquitous. Since 1945, 443 Holocaust movies have been produced for theatrical, video and television release, according to Rich Brownstein, an American writer who has lectured at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. Brownstein, in Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis […]
Yeshiva University has painted itself into an untenable, unsustainable and unacceptable position. As a secular institution, this flagship university of Modern Orthodoxy in New York City accepts public funding for its graduate programs, yet its undergraduate program is religiously oriented. The inherent tension between these diametrically opposed streams came to a head recently following the […]
Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian American Democrat who represents the state of Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives, clearly marches to her own drummer. Although she is not the only Arab American in Congress, she is still its only representative who rejects Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and calls for a binational state in […]