Archive by Author: TTN

Although The Third Narrative is nonpartisan, we examine the impact of politics (whether in the US, Israel or academia) on Israel and the Jewish community.  It is in this spirit that TTN reproduces the following, selected in abridged form from Steven Richard Sheffey’s weekly newsletter, “Chicagoland Pro-Israel Political Update,” focusing on the two US Senate […]

An Iraq War veteran (of mixed Ashkenazi and Iraqi Jewish ancestry) and two-time failed Republican candidate for public office, Elan Carr, was appointed in Feb. 2019 as State Dept. “Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting anti-Semitism.”  Carr’s been in the news for advocating an aggressive strategy of “philo-Semitism,” going on the offensive against antisemitism by projecting […]

Not surprisingly, publications and writers with different political leanings have handled this issue differently.  Conservative journalist John Podhoretz, writing in the NY Post, has gone ballistic against New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for his Twitter chastisement of “the Jewish community” in charedi neighborhoods of Brooklyn for ignoring public health social distancing rules. The New […]

Perhaps it can be said that the Coronavirus crisis has claimed its first triumph over a government in apparently causing Kahol-Lavon (Blue and White) party leader Benny Gantz to accede to a coalition agreement with Likud, without forcing the retirement of Israel’s criminally-indicted Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.  Gantz has declared this a necessity to meet […]

On Feb. 11, Yossi Beilin spoke at New York University’s Taub Center for Israel Studies where he has an appointment for this semester.  A member of both the Rabin and Barak governments, he was a leading actor in the Oslo Peace Process and later headed the Meretz party.  He relates a compelling story of how […]

At first glance, it seems to meet some Palestinian demands for a state, including land swaps in compensation for Israel annexing settlements, but one should not be fooled.  Israel wouldn’t only annex the so-called settlement blocs contiguous to the 1949-’67 armistice lines, but also dispersed non-contiguous settlements, and the Jordan Valley to boot.  The territories […]

On Dec. 25 (three days prior to the Monsey stabbing attack), a TTN colleague, historian Shulamit Magnus, blogged in The Times of Israel under the title “A plea against ‘anti-Semitism‘.”   This is about the nomenclature, arguing that the term itself is problematic*: “The pseudo-scientific term, coined by a German racist, obscures the rising tide of […]