Strong in Sderot

By bspagat November 15, 2010

Bailey Spagat is participating in Career Israel, one of Masa Israel’s 180 programs.

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The Reading List: Making the Cut

By Ben Sales November 1, 2010

Schmooze Magazine, Northwestern’s Jewish student magazine, debates the merits of the circumcised penis. [Schmooze] Newsflash: Bernie Madoff did not kill Birthright. [Schmooze] Across the pond, El Al orders a professor to leave her luggage — and her clothes — behind. [Vos Iz Neias] And in the Middle East, an Israeli student gets paid NIS 12,000…

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The New One-State Solution

By Ben Sales August 5, 2010

Those gosh-darn liberal, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, Palestinian-loving Likkudniks. In a bizarre turn of events, members of the Israeli right-wing are now endorsing an answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was once the purview of the Israeli far left and the intellectual circles of Europe and the US: the one-state solution. An article in the JTA reported today that Knesset…

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An Honest Look at Israel

By Ben Sales June 14, 2010

One Thanksgiving during college, my father told us that though we criticize many of the United States’s policies and actions, we should never forget that we live in the greatest country in the world: a country that pioneered and sustains religious and civic freedom, political equality, tolerance and democracy. His point was that criticism and appreciation should…

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The Punishment of Gazans Must End

By smelamed June 8, 2010

I know we’ve all heard enough about a certain clash on a certain boat in the waters off a certain strip.  So forgive me for once again using this space to talk about the Mavi Marmara melee.  If it’s any consolation, the bulk of this post won’t focus on the early morning events of last…

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Mavi Marmara and Productive Conversation

By Ben Sales June 1, 2010

The Twitterizing of the news has reached a crisis point in the Israeli-Palestinian forum. For a long time, the Jewish community in the US has viewed the conflict in black-and-white: The elders have decided that Jewish solidarity necessitates categorical defense of Israel, and they treat any deviation from the institutional line as a threat. There is no…

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Idiocy at Sea: The Bigger Picture

By smelamed May 31, 2010

I spent my entire day huddled over my computer, constantly refreshing Ha’aretz and JPost, periodically checking the Gaza flotilla trending topic on Twitter, and generally just trying to make sense of last night’s flotilla fiasco.  And twelve hours into it, I’m still at a loss. Thus far, here’s what we know: early Monday morning, 130…

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J Street U: Jerusalem and Gaza: What Could and Should Happen

By admin May 7, 2010

by Moriel Rothman, Middlebury College George Mitchell is now traveling from Ramallah to Jerusalem as the “proximity talks” resume and President Obama, riding his health care reform wave, seems to be putting a significant amount of weight behind these efforts to get the peace process moving again. The situation remains fragile but there is a…

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The Middle East’s Mirage

By smelamed February 22, 2010

Before coming to Israel, everyone I spoke to raved about Tel Aviv. Oh, you’ll love it there, It’s such a hip city, and so on and so forth. All this was music to my ears, except when I remembered that I’d actually be living about 100 kilometers east in the very austere and very un-hip…

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On Gilad Shalit and Media Manipulation

By smelamed February 8, 2010

Today is the 1,324th day of Gilad Shalit’s captivity. In fact, as I write this, it’s been 1,324 days, 14 hours, 19 minutes, and roughly 31 seconds since Shalit walked free. I know this not because of any particular concern on my part, but because everyone in Israel knows this. It’s impossible not to. Along…

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