NewsTrust - Judaism - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

A Jewish state or an Israeli democracy?

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Haaretz - By Shlomo Sand - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - There's far too little criticism in Israel of this latest whim, which until recently was absent from Israeli diplomacy. For years, Israel struggled to be recognized by the Arab world. But in March 2002, when the Arab League and the Muslim world took up the Saudi initiative to recognize Israel within its 1967 borders, a new threat appeared: peace, which can fragment the Jewish character of the state from within, and rightfully so.

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Peter Beinart vs. the ADL

Sat, 29 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Abraham H. Foxman, Peter Beinart - May. 29 (Comment) - Israelis, to a large extent, and this is shared by many in the American Jewish community (another of Beinart’s targets), feel frustrated that all their efforts toward changing the dynamic have been met with rejection and/or violence. Most Israelis understand that continuing to sit in the West Bank is not good for the country. So at Camp David in 2000 they tried a solution of ending the conflict, which included withdrawing from 90 percent of the territories and eliminating the majority of settlements. They got a big no and suicide bombs.

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Op-Ed Contributor: Many Faiths, One Truth

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Tenzin Gyatso - May. 25 (Opinion) - Though every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity, there is genuine potential for mutual understanding.

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The Special Relationship

Fri, 21 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - May. 21 (Comment) - Until 1948, American Jews were a unique ethno-religious group in the American mosaic. They did not have an "old country." They came from everywhere -- but essentially from nowhere specific that they fondly called "home." American Italians, Irish, Poles,

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The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Peter Beinart - May. 17 (Opinion) - In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

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Israel and liberal Jews are moving apart.

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jacob Weisberg - Mar. 21 (Opinion) - One might well fill a book with all the possible explanations for rising liberal, and in particular Jewish liberal, qualms about Israel. But the blame has to start with Israel's occupation of Arab lands and its settlements policy. Israel never meant to take over the West Bank and Gaza—it got stuck with them after the 1967 war. But decades of harsh occupation have made dispossessed Palestinians, the majority of whom have long favored a two-state solution, the sympathetic victims in the conflict. Revisionist Zionism—the Biblically based claim that Israel has a right to the territories—has wrought tremendous damage to the Israel's moral standing. Encouraging religious and political extremists to settle in those territories set a wedge between Israel and its liberal supporters, who see annexation as both impractical and immoral.

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Which Way for Hamas?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Nicolas Pelham, Max Rodenbeck - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - Amid the wreckage of Gaza, Hamas's officials struggle to sound upbeat. The burly interior minister, Fathi Hamad, whose predecessor was killed by an Israeli bomb, defiantly shuns security precautions at his makeshift office in Gaza City's main police station. "Claims that we are trying to establish an Islamic state are false," says the minister, who says his preference would be pursuing a degree in media studies. "Hamas is not the Taliban. It is not al-Qaeda. It is an enlightened, moderate Islamic movement."

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Israel Turns on Itself

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By Noah Efron - Jul. 20 (Opinion) - Secular Israelis, for their part, live in perpetual dismay over the fact that their successes have never led them to where they expected to arrive. Their parents’ generation, and that of their parents, expected to be vindicated, that the value and truth of the ideology they embraced would be confirmed by the society they built. After Zionists produced the Good Society, they reasoned, no one could doubt that Zionism itself is a social good. And for some time, it seemed that this formula had proven itself to be Israel’s self-image, broadly, as the country passed through two phases.

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The tragedy of the Yemeni Jews

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Lyn Julius - Jun. 08 (Opinion) - The last Jews of Yemen are leaving. They are packing their bags and moving to Israel or the US. A community dating back to Biblical times is on the brink of extinction.

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How Iran Could Save the Middle East

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Jeffrey Goldberg - Jun. 04 (Opinion) - The definitive Middle East cliché is “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” With Shiite Iran growing stronger, Jews and Sunni Arabs suddenly have a potent basis for friendship. Could leveraging Sunni fears of rising Shiite power finally solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem? The case for a Sunni-Jewish alliance

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Caught in the Middle

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By David Ignatius - May. 02 (Opinion) - Gaza is simply one of those problems for which there isn’t much middle ground. Israelis and Palestinians are both convinced not only that they are right, but that the other side is morally bankrupt.

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Iran, the Jews and Germany

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Roger Cohen - Mar. 02 (Opinion) - For all the morality police inspecting whether women are wearing boots outside their pants (the latest no-no on the dress front) and the regime zealots of the Basiji militia, the air you breathe in Iran is not suffocating. Its streets at dusk hum with life — not a monochrome male-only form of it, or one inhabited by fear — but the vibrancy of a changing, highly educated society.

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British Jews and Israel: a new relationship?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Keith Kahn-Harris - Jan. 13 (Opinion) - British Jews who have felt discomfort with Israeli actions have generally been faced with a bleak choice: to express this discomfort privately and quietly or be marginalised and perhaps even ostracised.

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When the Big Spenders Fail, Who Will Save Jewish Charity?

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Lucette Lagnado - Dec. 27 (Opinion) - The Madoff scandal has shaken the American Jewish community to its core -- maiming institutions large and small, wiping out life savings and triggering soul-searching: How could one man deceive so many? And what does the affair say about American Jewish values?

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India's Jews

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 10:33:09 -0700

Forbes - By Gary Weiss - Aug. 13 (Opinion) - There's no question that India's secularism is under strain. Militant Hinduism remains as much a potent force as extremist Islam. The ongoing bloodletting in Kashmir is an open sore, and the periodic spasms of communal violence in Gujarat, combined with memories of the Mumbai bombings of 2006, have led to undeniable tensions. Just have a chat sometime with a Kashmiri Pandit--a Hindu displaced from that war-torn region--and you will know what I mean. Yet this country of 1 billion largely impoverished people, home of the second-largest Muslim population in the world, still manages to maintain a sturdy system of democracy based on respect for religious and ethnic diversity. In the U.S., diversity is a politically correct slogan. In India it is a historical fact. Much as we in the West may resent it, India has a lot to teach us when it comes to religious tolerance.

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Taming Leviathan

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:10:58 -0700

Economist - Mar. 15 (Opinion) - THIS week saw yet another reminder of the awesome power of "the lobby". The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) brought more than 6,000 activists to Washington for its annual policy conference. And they proceeded to live up to their critics' darkest fears. They heard from the four most powerful people on Capitol Hill--Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner from the House, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell from the Senate--as well as the vice-president (who called his talk "The United States and Israel: United We Stand") and sundry other power-brokers. Several first-division presidential candidates held receptions.

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Iran's Obsession with the Jews

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 06:50:02 -0800

Weekly Standard - By Matthias Küntzel - Feb. 11 (Opinion) - On December 12, 2006, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad personally brought to a close the infamous Holocaust deniers' conference in Tehran. A strange parade of speakers had passed across the podium: former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the nutty followers of the anti-Zionist Jewish sect Neturei Karta, and officials of the neo-Nazi German National party, along with the familiar handful of professional Holocaust deniers. Frederick Töben had delivered a lecture entitled "The Holocaust--A Murder Weapon." Frenchman Robert Faurisson had called the Holocaust a "fairy tale," while his American colleague Veronica Clark had explained that "the Jews made money in Auschwitz." A professor named McNally had declared that to regard the Holocaust as a fact is as ludicrous as believing in "magicians and witches." Finally, the Belgian Leonardo Clerici had offered the following explanation in his capacity as a Muslim: "I believe that the value of metaphysics is greater than the value of history."

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