Politics

Dreaming of Bahrain

March 2, 2011

Bahrain is right next to Iran – that sounds like fun! We have just over a month to go until we leave for our long-planned trek to Nepal to celebrate my 50th birthday and Aviv’s bar mitzvah. There’s only one problem standing in our way: Bahrain. The cheapest way to get to Asia for Israelis […]

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Land Grab

February 1, 2011

IDF Chief of Staff candidate Yoav Galant UPDATE: The Attorney General has decided not to defend Galant. Crime, it seems, will not be rewarded in this case! One of the most frustrating parts of living in Israel is when people think they’re above the law. You see it on the highways (speeding, not yielding the […]

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Lunch with Jack: From Sudan to Jerusalem

January 20, 2011

Refugees travel from Sudan north through Egypt to Israel One of the hot topics in the news these past months has been the steady influx of refugees from Africa who have crossed the border between Egypt and Israel, and Israel’s subsequent response of building a fence to keep the Africans out. With 1,000 refugees arriving […]

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Goats on a Hill

December 30, 2010

Aviv and Nesiya A couple of months back, on our trip to Nagal Og near the Dead Sea, we picked up a friend of our youngest son. Aviv’s classmate Nesya lives in what is known as an illegal outpost deep in the West Bank. It is so tiny we couldn’t find it on any map […]

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Return to “The Settler from Jerusalem”

March 23, 2010

Photo from AP With Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s declaration before yesterday’s AIPAC conference that “Jerusalem is not a settlement” – a response to U.S. claims to the contrary regarding at least part of the city –  I thought it would be instructive to look at a personal incident that occurred nearly five years ago. In […]

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Cliff’s Air Conditioner, Climate Change, and the Jewish People

January 19, 2010

My friend Cliff called this week to say he was getting rid of an old air conditioning unit and would I want to take it off his hands…at no charge? Cliff knew that I had spent much of the summer sweltering in my top floor home office. I have an air conditioner already but, at […]

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Watching Battlestar Galactica from the Middle East – Part II

November 2, 2006

New Season Evokes Holocaust, Iraq as Allegory Shifts to Occupation Theme A few weeks ago I published an article reviewing the hit Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica. In it, I compared the theme of nuclear jihad in the fictional program with the realpolitick of contemporary fundamentalism vs. the West. My review covered the series […]

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