Despite the (perhaps) sudden uptick of young Jewish personal essayists, summer camp memoirists and opinion writers voicing disillusion with Israel, I registered surprise by how quietly the five-year anniversary of Gilad Shalit's abduction passed. It seems that those apostates who are outraged -- and rightly so -- at...

A few minutes after the news of the Osama Bin Laden's timely death diffused wildly across the electronic corridors, I freed myself from the grasp of the commentariat and went to a bar on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn. I went for reasons I couldn't immediately identify, somewhere between wanting to...

Dear Richard,

I just wanted to drop you a line and see if you're feeling well these days. I have to admit, I've been a little bit worried about you.

Like many people who help the media place a disproportionate amount of focus on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, I read with...

For all the transitory good that Egypt's Cotton Revolution (trademark not pending) allowed, we can expect to hear more over the next few weeks about the decline of American influence in the Middle East. It's a conversation worth having. But as the most populous Arab country begins a national rebirth,...

Before escaping to Israel in 2003, Ephraim lived in a camp with 15,000 other Eritreans. Like a growing number of refugees from Eritrea as well as the Congo, Darfur, and Southern Sudan, Ephraim set off to evade the lethal farrago of political unrest, genocide, and deprivation that has come to...

When NFL Commish Roger Goodell handed down punishment against Houston Texans all-pro wide receiver Andre Johnson, Goodell considered a number of factors in deciding not to suspend Johnson for his Balrog-style haymaker combo on Tennessee Titans cornerback Cortland Finnegan. The incident, which took place in the...

The disquieting arrival of former President Bush from his two-year public hiatus was met with both low ratings and wide derision for good reason: the troubling specter of this man post-presidency, hardly contrite or searching, bruises many Americans in a way that's difficult to put into words. If anything, he...

One of Yitzhak Rabin's many famous military assignments took place in 1948, very shortly after the founding of the State of Israel. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion summoned the Israeli army to carry out a peculiar task: Rabin and his men were to fire on the Altalena, a ship carrying weapons...

They arrived on buses from nearby city centers and faraway small towns. There was Brooklyn and Philadelphia, but there was also Boise and Purdue. They flew in from Florida and Quebec and, as caricatures might, perhaps rolled their eyes at the electronic banner that welcomed them to Ronald Reagan National...

One of the enduring pedagogical tactics of professors is the deployment of the phrase "Show, don't tell." It's shorthand for a moment when there is too much exposition, too much explaining.

For example: instead of writing something like "As men with wooden stakes and kindling began approaching the congressional...

With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu balancing a strangely adolescent courtship of both his right-wing coalition and the American-led peace process with the Palestinians, murmurs from the Israeli left wing have been especially indistinct lately. Undermined by nearly a decade of right-wing dominance, the Israeli left has...

In a benumbing turn of events, Abe Foxman, chief of the influential Anti-Defamation League and opponent of Park51 -- the so-called Ground Zero Mosque -- gave a speech this week decrying the rising culture of anti-Islam bigotry. Addressing the Boston chapter of the ADL, Foxman

One story that managed to stay under the radar last week was the interception of another aid ship aiming to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. Last Tuesday morning, The Irene, a catamaran with nine Jewish activists from Great Britain, Germany, America, and Israel, was...