Do you, your family, neighborhood, Jewish agency or synagogue engage in a tikkun olam (repairing the world) project for Chanukah? Tell us about it! Send your story — no more than 300 words — to localnews@azjewishpost.com by Dec. 14. If we print it in the Dec. 23 AJP, you’ll be eligible to win a literary [...]
Read More »These days, the word “fascism” is used here in Israel almost casually. It is spoken sometimes with glee, often in sorrow. Yet while it is fair (and painful) to say that a crop of laws, recent and prospective, are anti-democratic, the word “fascism” simply does not fit the Israeli reality. Bibi Netanyahu makes a preposterous [...]
Read More »The Arab upheavals of 2011 have inspired wildly inconsistent Western responses. How, for example, can one justify abiding the suppression of dissidents in Bahrain while celebrating dissidents in Egypt? Or protect Libyan rebels from government attacks but not their Syrian counterparts? Oppose Islamists taking over in Yemen but not in Tunisia? Such ad hockery reflects [...]
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DENVER (JTA) — Alan Gross is a Jewish-American contractor who is serving a 15-year prison sentence in Cuba for “crimes against the state.” Gross, now 62 and in ill health, was arrested in 2009 as he was leaving Cuba. His family and U.S. State Department officials say that Gross was in the country on a [...]
Read More »Tel Aviv – Pictures of unarmed demonstrators clashing with police and security forces have become the defining images of the Arab Spring. The wave of mass protests and demonstrations has led to the collapse of despotic regimes including those led by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. In all [...]
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My first trip to Israel was in 1982 (it still seems a bit surreal when I think of it) when I went with the federation national leadership into Lebanon to witness the Israeli military action that resulted in Lebanon’s liberation from the Palestinian Liberation Organization. On that remarkable journey we heard from then-Prime Minister Menachem [...]
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I want to challenge one of the mainstay assumptions of organized Jewish life: Jewish continuity is the end goal, and everything is in service of that goal. It’s been 20 years since the release of the 1990 National Jewish Population Study, which found an unprecedented rate of intermarriage. It launched 1,000 ships of Jewish identity [...]
Read More »My first assignment when I entered the U.S. Foreign Service in 1976 was as a “rotational officer” in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs. I served for six months backstopping our delegation to the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council, then another six months on U.N. conferences related to water [...]
Read More »This is the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the first one I will mark without my father. Kristallnacht is referred to as the “night of broken glass.” But it was much more. It was the beginning of the end of most of European Jewry. It was two days of Nazi government-sponsored riots on Nov. 9 [...]
Read More »WASHINGTON (JTA) — We have decided to take a journey. We will take the Food Stamp Challenge and live for one week on an average SNAP (food stamp) benefit of $31.50 per week. We are organizing and encouraging others to join us. Yet we hear one question again and again: Why? We have heard the [...]
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