39 Steps

Opinion

Licensed to kvell: The return of Oy-Oy

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Have I got a secret agent for you! When Hamas is smuggling missiles, and Iranians are building A-bombs deep underground, to whom can Israel turn? 007? No way. He’s busy playing baccarat or keeping the world from being fried by space lasers. He hasn’t time for the Middle East. But Israeli secret agent [...]

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Giving the gift of tikkun olam

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 [...]

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‘Deadly Medicine’ Nazi exhibit coming to UA

aRegarding the article “New York exhibit on ‘Deadly Medicine’ plumbs Nazi ‘science’ of master race” (AJP, 11/11/11), your readers may be interested to learn that the exhibit will be in Tucson Jan. 18-March 31, 2013. The Arizona Health Sciences Library at the University of Arizona will host “Deadly Medicine” with support from the UA College [...]

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Kristallnacht program at JCC great success

I would like to commend Bob Cohen, director of the Tucson Jewish Community Library; the Coalition for Jewish Education; and all the people involved in presenting the touching and well-organized “The Night of the Broken Glass” with Kristallnacht survivors speaking at the Tucson Jewish Community Center on Nov. 10. The room was packed with community [...]

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Israeli democracy is at stake as left and right hurl fascist accusations

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 [...]

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Almost friendless in the Middle East

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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Alan and Judy Gross at the Western Wall in the spring of 2005. (Courtesy of the Gross family)
Alan and Judy Gross at the Western Wall in the spring of 2005. (Courtesy of the Gross family)

Plea of Alan Gross’ wife to GA

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 [...]

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Arab Spring carves out potential role for Arab Israelis

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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Stuart and Nancy Mellan with Murray Greenfield (center), an American seaman who smuggled Jews out of Europe into Palestine in 1947, at Atlit, the British detention camp where Greenfield was held with Jewish refugees.
Stuart and Nancy Mellan with Murray Greenfield (center), an American seaman who smuggled Jews out of Europe into Palestine in 1947, at Atlit, the British detention camp where Greenfield was held with Jewish refugees.

Despite 30 years of setbacks to peace, Israel is still a miraculous place

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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Rabbi Elie Kaunfer
Rabbi Elie Kaunfer

Return Torah to its place of glory

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 [...]

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