Eugenia Brin was 48 when she first noticed that her left leg was dragging. It took two years for doctors finally to diagnose her with early onset Parkinson’s disease, because she didn’t have tremors or other easily identifiable symptoms. The diminutive Brin, trained as an...
“Find out if your girlfriend is a feminist before you get too far into it,” Phyllis Schlafly told assembled students at The Citadel military academy in April. “Some of them are pretty. They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.” This was April 2012—not, say, 1972, a...
In late May, protestors rioted against the tens of thousands of African migrant workers and asylum seekers living in south Tel Aviv. They attacked passersby, smashed cars and vandalized shops. Within two weeks, the government began a brutal campaign to deport refugees from South Sudan. Interior...
There’s nothing wrong with negotiating with your enemies. There is something wrong if you don’t know that those sitting across the table from you are your enemies. Too many Americans, Europeans and even Israelis still don’t grasp that Iran’s rulers—not average Iranians, but those who...
On the sleepy afternoon of March 21, 2012, alarm sirens went off all over Jerusalem, sending me and my racing heart lunging toward our air raid shelter. Squeezed in among my neighbors, bags of old clothes and various bicycles, I found my mind wandering back...
Similarities between Judaism and Islam are easy to see. Both are monotheistic religions for whom the Lord is One. Both are religions based on revelation. In both, law is central, and personal and social existence is governed by a divinely ordained legal system. There are...
Elections are in the air—and not just in the United States. In December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for early primaries in his Likud Party, a likely indicator that he may dissolve the Knesset sometime in 2012 and call a general election. The ball...
One bill in the Knesset is aimed at keeping human rights groups from filing suit before Israel’s Supreme Court. Another would bar mosques from using loudspeakers for the call to prayer; the supposed ban on noise pollution says nothing of church bells, sirens announcing the...
Mainstream Sunni Arab countries—traditionally adversaries of Israel—are now its potential allies in the struggle against Iran and militant Islam. One of the signal characteristics of Israel’s security thinking in the country’s early decades was its development of grand strategies—concepts for coordinating the nation’s resources toward attaining its...
Israel’s High Court agreed that gender separation on Israeli public buses violated the principles of equality, individual rights and freedom of religion. In 2004, I embarked on what I thought was going to be a simple 30-minute bus ride from the center of Jerusalem to my home...
