Archive by Author: Ralph Seliger

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 […]

On Sunday, November 3rd, the Manhattan JCC commemorated the 24th anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination (Nov. 4, 1995) with a public event featuring  Yossi Klein Halevi, an American-Israeli writer.  Yossi Klein (as he was known when growing up in the US) began his activism in New York as a teenaged disciple of rightwing […]

On the evening of Sept. 16, New York’s YIVO Institute sponsored a massively attended panel discussion called “Bundism’s Influence Today.”  The panel was diverse in age, but less so in viewpoint.  The audience included an impressive number of engaged young Jews, but apparently few with sympathy for the Jewish state.  Although the panel’s moderator, Prof. Jack Jacobs […]

The following revisits debates from recent decades that still weigh upon American Jews and supporters of Israel, but leaves aside blatant antisemitic conspiracy theories.  How do we fairly assess the impact of the “Israel Lobby” and the neoconservatives on the al Qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and on the US response — including its misadventure in Iraq?  […]