When I was at Columbia U. Monday, I stopped at the Hillel for tea and grabbed a brochure for a group called Masa. It’s the professional equivalent of the birthright tour. It offers grants to American kids to do internships…
The Economist has a great package on Israel at 60. It talks plainly about the spiritual crisis the society is in. [T]alks on a Palestinian state look doomed to failure…a separation from the Palestinians may no longer be possible, forcing…
This Mother Jones piece on the new J Street lobby says that its $1.5 million budget is up against a Goliath in $100 million Aipac, whose new headquarters in Washington was funded by Sheldon Adelson, according to unnamed “sources.” Adelson…
I’ve long contended that a war between the neocons and the progressives inside the Jewish community is necessary for American Jewry to recover from Iraq–to understand the ways that neoconservative support for Israel led to planning what (predictably) turned out…
Good for NPR; it aired a report on the new “J Street” lobby, an alternative to Aipac, this morning. NPR’s got a lot of liberal Jewish listeners. Will they support J Street? Reporter Michele Keleman interviewed Dennis Ross of WINEP…
Now that I’m looking into the “Nakba,” or Palestinian catastrophe of ’48, I’ve come to understand that division of water rights, land swaps, settlement of refugee issues etc. are all subsidiary to a spiritual process of recognition. Last night I…
I remember my editor at the Philadelphia Daily News, Zach Stalberg, a legendary newsman, stunning me in ’79 when he said he was voting for Carter but prayin for Reagan. Why? “He’s just a lot better for news.” I think…
I keep talking about Sheldon Adelson, America’s third-richest man, whose pro-Israel activities the Times all but ignored last week. Turns out his foundation shells out for a birthright-style happy tour of Israel, this one for Harvard law students that some…
says Diane Ralph, who has started an organization called the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians to take on the lobby in Canada. Ralph reports the same glasnost we are seeing here: “The floodgates have opened,” Ralph says in a telephone…