Archive by Author: Ralph Seliger

In results analogous to how Donald Trump won in the U.S. Electoral College, despite a popular vote deficit of 2.8 million in 2016, Benjamin Netanyahu is returning to power due to an artifact of Israel’s electoral system — the 3.25% minimum threshold required of competing lists to be elected to the Knesset (raised from 2% in […]

As recorded on YouTube (see below), Rep. Andy Levin seems enormously appealing and upright.  I basically share his views on Israel and the Palestinians, which favor a negotiated two-state solution, a different perspective than Peter Beinart who interviewed him days prior to his primary loss.  AIPAC channeled money to help defeat him, while not spending […]

Drawn in by a Haaretz alert about a lethal attack on Israelis in Beersheva, I found another story about a threat against Palestinian homes.  This is from the Haaretz article about the attack by an ISIS supporter who murdered four (pictured here) and injured two, including mothers of young children and a Chabad rabbi: Hamas and Islamic Jihad […]

I’m not especially religious, but I belong to a synagogue, and a virtual religious Jewish community during the pandemic.  Much of this post is drawn from my Dvar Torah (sermon) last Saturday.   The Sabbath before Purim is called Shabbat Zachor; zachor (also transliterated as “zakhor”) means “you shall remember.”  What we are to remember is to “blot […]

On Sunday, Feb. 13th, the Indiana University Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism hosted a talk by Irwin Cotler, a retired law professor and former Canadian Member of Parliament, Justice Minister and Attorney General who remains active battling antisemitism.  Politically, he’s a stalwart of Canada’s Liberal party, basically a centrist who has represented clients […]

On Dec. 20, 2021, Alan Johnson, editor of the British online journal, Fathom, debated Prof. Leila Farsakh (a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Boston) in a webinar hosted by Peter Beinart.  Despite Beinart’s public preference for one binational state in Israel/Palestine, he moderated the discussion fairly, as is his custom.    One of Johnson’s […]

As a perk for signing up for at least one session of this year’s PPI Digital Israel Symposium, I watched “The Tinderbox“ by an English-Jewish filmmaker named Gillian Mosely.  She tried to show “both sides” of the conflict, but what she really did was to mostly present hardline Israeli views alongside understandable grievances from a number of […]