SPME
A recent trip to Toronto unsettled me. Speaking to various “Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,” I heard many parents confess their fears about their children’s “safety” on campus. They had heard too many examples of both pro-Palestinian activists and…
read moreMontrealers seeking peace in the Middle East should condemn the “All-Canada BDS Conference” convening here this weekend. “BDS” stands for “boycott, divestment, and sanctions,” a toxic cocktail designed to ostracize Israel. This tactic makes it hard to achieve a two-state…
read moreIdeologues left and right seem unhinged these days. Leftists claim that bullying right-wingers menace Israeli democracy. Their diatribes suggest there is no free thought in Israeli universities, with everyone forced to parrot a right-wing line. Meanwhile rightists charge traitorous left-wingers…
read moreThere is something wrong with this picture: This is a golden age for Jews on North American campuses. Never before have there been so many Jewish college presidents and Jewish professors, Jewish students and Jewish Studies majors. Yet, this is…
read moreLast week I was bicycling through Jerusalem’s picturesque German Colony. Suddenly, at one of those blind intersections where the picturesque building looms dangerously close to the picturesque curb, an SUV cut me off. I braked. The next thing I knew…
read moreDespite the warm words and attempts at progress when President Barack Obama hosted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the “make up summit” Tuesday, Obama still does not get it. Stale ideas and boilerplate rhetoric are not enough. President Obama must…
read moreLast week, I addressed hundreds of young Australians finishing their “shnat” year-in-Israel programs. A number asked me more or less the same critical question: How can we be pro-Zionist while being pro-Palestinian (and thus occasionally criticized for being anti-Zionist)? I…
read moreLast week, I addressed hundreds of young Australians finishing their “shnat” year-in-Israel programs. A number asked me more or less the same critical question: How can we be pro-Zionist while being pro-Palestinian (and thus occasionally criticized for being anti-Zionist)? I…
read moreWhite House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s visit to Israel this week for his son’s bar mitzva helps refute Peter Beinart’s controversial article claiming that modern Zionism and liberalism are becoming incompatible. The Emanuel family has witnessed the real, multi-dimensional,…
read moreThe 36th World Zionist Congress has been meeting in Jerusalem this week, but few people noticed. The Congress which once shaped Jewish history is a ghost of its former self. Zionism is in crisis, attacked internally and externally, by frustrated…
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