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Richard Z. Chesnoff
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Richard Z. Chesnoff, a prize winning veteran of more than 40 years of global news work, has covered many of the major stories and personalities of our times. A former foreign correspondent for Newsweek and executive editor of Newsweek International, he was senior correspondent of US News & World Report from 1985 to 2003 and has been an op-ed columnist for The NY Daily News since 1994.

Blog Entries by Richard Z. Chesnoff

Barack Needs Bill to Make an Israeli-Palestinian Peace

Posted June 29, 2011 | 13:20:02 (EST)

With the election season nearly in full swing, President Obama's campaign fund-raisers have reason to be nervous. The U.S. economy remains deep in the doldrums and there's growing bipartisan criticism in Congress over Obama's Afghanistan withdrawal plans -- not to mention his costly and confusing undeclared war mess in Libya.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory: Victory Among a Century's Tears

Posted March 24, 2011 | 18:10:42 (EST)

With the exception of September 11, 2001, no disaster has ever traumatized New York more than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911 - 100 years ago this weekend.

It broke out on a balmy afternoon after someone carelessly tossed what was probably a cigarette butt into...

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Sephardic Film Festival: From Spanish Expulsion to Vidal Sassoon

Posted March 12, 2011 | 14:50:05 (EST)

New York's annual Sephardic Film Festival is always a tasty treat. First and foremost, it provides us with a cinematic kaleidoscope of the destinies of the descendants of those hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews expelled from Iberia by the 15th century Inquisition. Refusing to be forcibly converted to Catholicism,...

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Inside Muammar's Madhouse: Calling on Colonel Gaddafi

Posted February 24, 2011 | 11:23:06 (EST)

Visiting Muammar Gaddafi's Libya was always like dropping into "Abdul in Wonderland."

Marketplaces were jammed with shops but empty of goods. Enormous signboards bore the illogical slogans of the even more illogical Green Book, the bible of Gaddafi's Jamahiriya - state of the masses.

Walls were plastered with enormous...

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Don't Want to Rain on Your Cairo Parade, But the Army's Still in Charge

Posted February 11, 2011 | 12:04:13 (EST)

Hello out there, all you people deliriously celebrating the victory of democracy in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Please take some advice from an old Mideast hand: hold your horses (not to mention your camels).

I have not the slightest doubt that it was those 18 days of millions of heroic civilian...

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No Quick Solutions for Egypt

Posted February 7, 2011 | 17:00:17 (EST)

"You Americans always want quick solutions," Hosni Mubarak once told me during an interview in Cairo. "But," he added quickly, "in this part of the world there are no quick solutions; only accommodations."

Mubarak's words ring as true today as they did when Egypt's embattled president uttered them nearly...

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Stealing From the Dying: The Horror of Holocaust Fraud

Posted November 10, 2010 | 14:01:25 (EST)

Talk about horrific scandals!

The Justice Department has just announced that more than $40 million in funds earmarked for aid to needy and aging survivors of the Nazi Holocaust have instead been stolen and fraudulently distributed to thousands of people who were not at all eligible to receive them.

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The Jewish Problem With Obama: Part Five of Five

Posted October 12, 2010 | 11:36:12 (EST)

Part four of a five part series. Part one.

"The majority of today's American Jews don't see themselves as outsiders or victims anymore," says Binyamin Jolkovsky, the publisher and editor of the widely read Internet magazine JewishWorldReview.com "That's positive. But that feeling of equality has also...

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The Jewish Problem With Obama: Part Five of Five

Posted October 11, 2010 | 14:15:13 (EST)

(Part five of a five-part series)

"The majority of today's American Jews don't see themselves as outsiders or victims anymore," says Binyamin Jolkovsky, the publisher and editor of the widely read Internet magazine JewishWorldReview.com "That's positive. But that feeling of equality has also produced a communal negative. The...

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The Jewish Problem With Obama: Part Four of Five

Posted October 7, 2010 | 16:52:20 (EST)

Part four of a five part series. Part one.

At a certain point, many Jews began to wonder if there was something more behind the Obama administration's confrontational approach toward Israel than a simple difference of policy. As a result, they began to take a second look at...

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The Jewish Problem With Obama: Part Three of Five

Posted October 6, 2010 | 12:30:11 (EST)

Part three of a five part series. Part one.

On March 10th of this year, a relatively low-level official in the Israeli Interior Ministry issued a permit for 1,600 new housing units for Israelis in the Ramat Shlomo section of East Jerusalem. The ill-timed announcement came on the...

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The Jewish Problem With Obama: Part One of Five

Posted October 4, 2010 | 15:32:17 (EST)

"The Jews have three veltn (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the next world), and Roosevelt."
--Judge Jonah Goldstein, the 1945 Republican candidate for mayor of New York City

In the nearly eighty years since President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal with a pledge to "help the...

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The Jewish Problem With Obama: Part Two of Five

Posted October 2, 2010 | 14:09:29 (EST)

Part two of a five part series. Previously.

The current Jewish problem with Obama can be traced back to his first full day on the job. On January 21, 2009, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office and laid out a tough new policy toward...

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Surprise, Surprise! Palestinians Won't Recognize Jewish State

Posted September 12, 2010 | 14:29:42 (EST)

2010-09-09-ign_32_151_3216.jpg

"The Palestinian Authority will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state ... Such a declaration would directly threaten the Muslims and Christians in Israel and prevent Palestinian refugees, who left their homes and villages a number of decades ago,...

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Ground Zero Mosque Imam Has Long History of NJ Real Estate Woes

Posted August 31, 2010 | 15:28:53 (EST)

Imam Feisal Rauf, the Muslim cleric behind the contentious mosque/Islamic Center project near Ground Zero is no stranger to real estate woes. Two hard-working New Jersey investigative reporters, Peter J. Sampson and Jean Rambach of The Bergen Record, have uncovered details of Imam Rauf's career as a public housing landlord...

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The Ground Zero Mosque; Nat Hentoff Has His Say

Posted August 25, 2010 | 12:32:48 (EST)

Like most folks these days, I receive a steady stream of forwarded columns, blogs, articles and other items from the interesting but often invasive world of the internet. And like many other New Yorkers, many of these have lately dealt with the bitter controversy over plans to build an Islamic...

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A Film Unfinished: The Warsaw Ghetto As Seen Through Nazi Eyes

Posted August 16, 2010 | 13:10:00 (EST)

2010-08-14-filmunfinished.jpgJewish ghetto police round up Jews for the Nazi camera-man


Aside from Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, nothing epitomizes the horrors of the Holocaust more than the infamous Warsaw Ghetto.

Surrounded by a barbed wire topped 10 foot...

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Do the Palestinians Really Want Two States -- Or Are They Just Stalling?

Posted July 21, 2010 | 11:19:03 (EST)

Khaled Abu Toameh, to my mind the best Arab journalist working in Israel and the Palestinian territories, reports in today's Jerusalem Post that "Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has told his Fatah movement he wants a more specific US commitment on the borders of a future Palestinian state before agreeing...

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Downtown With Weimar-New York

Posted June 29, 2010 | 11:42:56 (EST)

2010-06-17-WNY_Layard_12June2010_72dpi.jpg

Pixie Harlot Layard, credit Earl Dax

That bottom part of Manhattan, once known as the Lower East Side and East Village and now called simply "Downtown," has its own madly ingenious world of creation and culture - from gay productions at the brand new...

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Two Nights At Tully: Professor Hawking, Yo-Yo Ma & Kids With Fiddles

Posted June 8, 2010 | 18:22:13 (EST)

Thanks to invitations from two generous friends, I had the distinct delight last week of spending consecutive musical nights at the magnificent new Alice Tully Hall. Each evening's concert was quite different from the other -- but in the end, both proved genuinely similar in spirit.

The first -- dubbed...

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