If you\’re like me, you probably read news reports about religious freedom the way you read the latest news on global warming: plowing dutifully through, eyes half-glazed over, certain it concerns you but not quite sure how.
along with news of its editor\’s death, the YiddishForward of May 15 carried front-page reports about India\’s nucleartests, the U.S.-Israeli diplomatic crisis, the naming of a specialprosecutor to probe the secretary of labor, and Israel\’s new militarychief of staff.
Some of you may have caught last week\’s New Yorker (May 25) with journalist David Remnick\’s profile of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. If not, I urge you to call the magazine\’s offices in New York and order a back copy, or simply visit your local library.
Just after dawn two years ago today, May 29, 1996, the all-night vote count finally tipped against Shimon Peres and for Binyamin Netanyahu, who would become the new prime minister. In the intervening two years, Peres was succeeded as head of the Labor Party by the slain Yitzhak Rabin\’s protegé, Ehud Barak. After a long stretch of running ahead of Netanyahu in the polls, Barak has now slipped behind.
Netanyahu came to America an embattled primeminister on May 13. He left four days later a conquering hero, buoyedby a reception in the Jewish community that aides said exceeded theirwildest expectations.
Last week, President Clinton diverted himself from fending off scandal and defaming his accusers to denounce the Unzinitiative, Proposition 227, which is designed to end the currentsystem of bilingual education. In the process, he may have contributed to the growing, and potentially debilitating, racialization of Los Angeles\’ political scene.
Some of you may have caught last week\’s New Yorker (May 25) with journalist David Remnick\’s profile of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. If not, I urge you to call the magazine\’s offices in New York and order a back copy, or simply visit your local library.\n\nRemnick offers us a portrait of Bibi as The Outsider.
Vice President Al Gore\’s visit to the Middle East may have been the biggest and best event yet in his 2000 presidential campaign, political observers here say.
As Rabbi Allen Freehling of University Synagogue in West Los Angeles and a bus load of bishops and rabbis left the Rome airport for their hotel near the Vatican, one of the bishops read aloud a document that would soon spark a firestorm of controversy around the world: the Vatican\’s March 16 statement on the Holocaust, released just hours before. The group had just flown in from Israel, where they had spent a week worshiping together, learning about each other\’s histories, and beginning to understand, as only true friends can, what the other believes.
Gangs of masked, Yiddish-speaking thugs in Brooklyn have been abducting Orthodox Jewish men and beating them savagely to force them into granting their wives a religious divorce,or get, according to several men who say they were victims of such assaults.The beatings allegedly were ordered by an Orthodox rabbinical court.\n
