Archive by Author: Ralph Seliger

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 […]

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 […]