Tagged Israel at 70

Israel at 70: What women in Israel and the West learned from each other

Hamutal Gouri, a founding leader of Women Wage Peace, says the feminist movement in Israel "learned a tremendous amount from American Jewish activists.” (Courtesy of Gouri)
April 12, 2018 / Debra Nussbaum Cohen, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) — American Jewish women have idealized Israeli women as feminist role models since the days of prestate Israel, when women were photographed plowing fields alongside men. Post-independence posters featured images of female soldiers fighting alongside men. A chain-smoking Golda Meir served as Israel’s prime minister nearly 50… Read more »

OP-ED: Israel at 70: How Israelis like me relate to a country that’s an ocean away

Ofra Daniel as the lead character Tirza in her play “Love Sick.” (Cheshiredave Creative)
April 9, 2018 / Ofra Daniel, JTA

SAN FRANCISCO (J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — My Dear Land, It is almost your birthday. At 70, you are not a young country anymore. Some will consider me a stepdaughter because I left you, deciding to move an ocean away. I left behind me the battles,… Read more »

ISRAEL AT 70: An American Holocaust survivor recalls fighting in Israel’s War of Independence

Mordechai Schachter at his home in Teaneck, N.J. (Josefin Dolsten)
April 4, 2018 / Josefin Dolsten, JTA

TEANECK, N.J. (JTA) — Mordechai Schachter didn’t know he would soon be a soldier when he traveled from his native Romania to prestate Israel in 1948. He was a 17-year-old with a passion for Zionism, leaving behind a country that was becoming increasingly anti-Semitic a few short years after at… Read more »

OP-ED: Israel at 70: It’s time to reclaim the Z-word, Zionism

Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, leaning over the balcony of the Drei Konige Hotel during the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Aug. 29, 1897. (GPO via Getty Images)
April 3, 2018 / Gil Troy, JTA

JERUSALEM (JTA) — All too often, when I ask campus organizations that are pro-Israel and deeply Zionist why they avoid using the “Z-word” in their messaging and literature, I’m told, “Zionism doesn’t poll well.” True, not polling well is one of today’s great sins. But imagine what our world would be… Read more »

Israel at 70: How 1948 changed American Jews

David Ben-Gurion, who was to become Israel's first prime minister, reads the new nation's Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948. (Zoltan Kluger/Israeli Government Press Office via Getty Images)
April 2, 2018 / Ben Sales, JTA

(JTA) — One year after Israel’s establishment, in the dead of night, three students ascended a tower at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and raised the Israeli flag. The next morning, the Conservative rabbinical school’s administration took it down. That act of surreptitious Zionist protest was one… Read more »