Archive by Author: Ralph Seliger

On March 23rd, Israel will hold its fourth national election in two years.  The multi-party contending field is even more chaotic than usual, but one dramatic change has occurred almost instantaneously with the Jan. 24th primary election of MK Merav Michaeli (pictured) to lead the Labor Party (Avodah).  Of the merely three Laborites elected to […]

Superstar leftwing Member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, backed out of speaking at an online memorial for Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin, sponsored by Americans for Peace Now.  To start the ball rolling backwards, an anti-Israel comment on Twitter apparently shook her up, questioning why she’d participate in a memorial for an Israeli leader who, as Defense […]

The following is an adaptation of my talk on Sept. 1 at a Zoom session of the NYC Political Forum, a “Meetup” group.  Some of what I’ve learned came from Dr. Nimrod Novik in an Israel Policy Forum webinar.  I began by thanking the organizer for providing some helpful news links: . . . The link […]

Religiously, Peter Beinart is what one may call “conservadox,” an observant Jew who attends a liberal-ish modern Orthodox synagogue but does not routinely cover his head and doesn’t consider himself Orthodox.  Some years back, we were both guests at the home of a mutual acquaintance for a Shabbat dinner.  And I’ve written a few articles […]

This top photo of a 1950s-era MAPAM socialist-Zionist celebration of May Day (distributed by Creative Commons.org CC by 2.5) accompanied my History News Network review article, “The Decline and Fall of Socialist Zionism.”  Tal Elmaliach, a young Israeli historian, has written a book (cover below) with a double focus: 1) the leftwing MAPAM political party and […]

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) opened its first full day on Feb. 9 with a session called “Leveraging Community Relations to Fight Antisemitism” — a panel consisting of Deborah Lipstadt (author most recently of Antisemitism Here and Now and a professor of Holocaust Studies at Emory University), Dove Kent (Senior Strategy officer at Bend the […]

There are at least 30 to 40 million Kurds living in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.  They are the largest ethnic group whose aspirations for self-determination were ignored by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that officially ended World War I.  They’ve gone through more than their fair share of conflict and persecution since, including the […]