Rabbi Moti Rieber reflects on why he did not attend synagogue on Rosh Hashanah this year. He says it comes down to three reasons: the religious practice is boring, he has lost his faith in Jewish community, and Israel is a mess.
The conflict is now central to the American left, as indicated by Haymarket’s six titles on Palestine in its fall 2015 list of books
Haaretz reports that Netanyahu has asked the Israeli attorney general to authorize sniper fire against stone throwing protesters.
Ann Coulter shouldn’t have said “fucking Jews” on twitter, but she was making a legitimate point: Republican candidates aren’t sucking up to Jewish voters on Israel but to neoconservative moneybags who want war in the Middle East.
Iran spends surprisingly little on its military, contrasted with Saudi Arabia and Israel. So why is Teheran demonized?
Islamophobia ran amok on Monday with the arrest and interrogation of 14 year old aspiring inventor, Ahmed Mohamed. Mohamed brought a homemade clock to school to impress his teacher at MacArthur High in Irving, Texas, but instead of encouraging words his teacher and principal called in the police. Mohamed was then interrogated without his parents present, handcuffed and hauled down to the local juvenile detention. Ahmed Mohamed is Muslim. His teacher thought his clock was a bomb. After Mohamed’s arrest went viral, andby Tuesday night it spiraled into a tidal wave of support.
The Pope has been called upon by members of the oldest churches at the roots of Christianity in the Middle East to intervene to end the financial crisis of nearly 50 schools serving the Palestinian community inside Israel. These schools provide education to over 33,000 Palestinian students in Israel; Christians, Muslims and Druze, and have been on strike since September 1st in protest of the Israeli government’s decision to further cut governmental funding of elementary church-run schools in Israel.
Maurice Ebileeni reflects on his family’s history of becoming Palestinian citizens of Israel during the Nakba instead of refugees in Lebanon or Syria. Aylan el-Kurdi tragic death has made him realize how easily he could be a refugee attempting to flee Syria now if his family had only made a different choice decades ago.
Immediately after the firebombing of the occupied West Bank village of Duma that killed eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabshe and later his parents, Israeli politicians competed to see who could be more extreme in their denunciations. But as the young parents of baby Ali succumbed to their wounds, the politicians who had been so vociferous were largely silent. What explains this gap between rhetoric and reality? Veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar tells Dan Cohen the lack of Israeli accountability for Jewish vigilante violence is not new, “The message is that you can get away with murder, literally.”
Temple Israel of Great Neck, L.I., hands out a flyer celebrating Israeli soldiers’ massacre in Gaza at Rosh Hashana services, conflating Judaism and militant Zionism