Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at the Daily Beast: Out for my morning bike ride Sunday, I looped up the ridge to Kibbutz Ramat Rachel on the south edge of Jerusalem. Two flocks of teenagers were coming down: the first dressed in white shirts, dark pants and crocheted skullcaps, the second in knee-length [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg And here’s my new column from Moment Magazine: The incident repeats itself with small variations. A rabbi somewhere in America writes to ask if I’ll come speak to his congregation about Israeli politics and my recent book, The Unmaking of Israel. Afterward I receive another email: At a meeting of the Israel Committee [...]

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My former student Sumit Galhotra has an excellent piece up at HuffPo on marking Armenian remembrance day in Jerusalem: JERUSALEM — As dusk settled over the Old City one evening recently, Noemie Nalbandian stepped into the dimly lit cathedral of St. James in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter. Hundreds of oil lamps hung from the vaulted dome [...]

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To distract attention from his economic policies, Netanyahu blames the victims Gershom Gorenberg My new Daily Beast piece is up: Spring in Israel this year brings not only Pesah but a whiff in the air of renewed economic protests, like those that swept the country last summer. Activists believe that after a long winter of [...]

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Haim Watzman My thoughts on the significance of the bitter herbs, on the anniversary of my last night with my son Niot, appear in this week’s “Shabbat Shalom,” the weekly Torah portion sheet put out by Oz VeShalom/Netivot Shalom. It’s available in both Hebrew and English Thanks to Kaddish Goldberg of Tirat Tzvi for giving [...]

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Haim Watzman This article was solicited last year by the Jewish Review of Books but got cut in favor of material on the summer protest movement. I forgot about it and just yesterday found it in my computer. I hope it will interest SoJo’s readers I had two adoptive families in Kiryat Shmonah, Israel’s northernmost [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect: The Israeli military has to face a lot of threats. Iran. Hezbollah. Rockets from Gaza. Women soldiers singing. If that last item seems out of place, it’s because you’re reading this in America (where, it’s true, presidential candidates can portray contraception as a danger [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Another happy opportunity to showcase the work of my erstwhile students, who have been producing fantastic work (even if I’m a bit late in posting some of it): “The battlefront that I see is not between Islam and the West or Muslims and America but between all of the moderates and all of [...]

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Day 3 of Slate’s ‘The Unmaking of Israel’ Excerpts Gershom Gorenberg Slate has published a third excerpt from my new book The Unmaking of Israel. You can also read Monday’s excerpt, with groundbreaking new evidence showing that Israel did not plan the expulsion of its Arab population in 1948, and yesterday’s, on how the secular [...]

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Day 2 of Slate’s ‘The Unmaking of Israel’ Excerpts Gershom Gorenberg Slate has just posted another excerpt my new book The Unmaking of Israel – this one on how the secular state of Israel created ultra-Orthodoxy as we know it. You can also read yesterday’s excerpt, with groundbreaking new evidence showing that Israel did not [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect. Yoram Kaniuk has won: The prominent Israeli novelist is now very officially a Jew of no religion. Hundreds of other Israelis, inspired by his legal victory, want to follow his example and change their religious status to “none” in the country’s Population Registry, while [...]

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Haim Watzman “The air is unexpectedly cool and damp for early September when I emerge from Terminal 3 and cross over to the AirTrain. I’m alone and there are no human sounds, only the roar of traffic on the highway. Even that is muted as the elevator door shuts.” I look up from 60C on [...]

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