Tensions flared again on March 2 on the University of California, Irvine (UCI) campus as pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students staged simultaneous demonstrations outside the administration building.\n
Israel announced its interest in producing electricity from nuclear energy at a conference in Paris.\n\nSyria announced the same intention at Tuesday\’s conference hosted by France to promote nuclear reactors.\n\n\”Israel is interested in being part of the circle of countries producing electricity from nuclear energy,\” Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau said at the conference, according to Haaretz.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Tuesday honored Britons whose extraordinary actions helped save Jews and other Holocaust victims during World War II, calling them a source of national pride.\n\nBrown met two surviving recipients — Nicholas Winton and Denis Avey — at a reception at his Downing Street home, and praised the role of 26 others in saving the lives of those persecuted by the Nazis.\n\nBritain has minted a new \”Hero of the Holocaust\” medal — a silver medallion — after a campaign by Jewish groups and lawmakers to win recognition for the bravery of those involved in the rescues.
Vice President Joe Biden denounced a decision to authorize new Jerusalem housing starts as \”undermining the trust\” that he needs to advance peace while in Israel.\n\n\”I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem,\” Biden said in a statement issued Tuesday, the second day of a visit that had been aimed at underscoring the closeness of the U.S.-Israel relationship. \”The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I\’ve had here in Israel.\”
The last time I saw Christopher Hitchens speak publicly in Los Angeles, he argued against God and religion. This time, delivering the eighth annual Daniel\nPearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA on March 3, he sounded a warning against a resurgence of anti-Semitism.\n
Why is it so expensive to live a Jewish life? Since Jewish continuity and vitality are such communal priorities, and since the great majority of Jewish students today\nare not getting a Jewish education, why has the Jewish community not done more to help in this area? And what could it do to change that?
We Jews need to face a sad, even tragic, fact. Things are not going very well in the relationship between God and most Jews.
All polling data agree that among Americans, Jews believe in God less than any other ethnicity or religion-based group. More Jews are agnostic, more Jews are atheist, more Jews are secular than any other group.
It was a very strange sight. There in The Washington Post was an article by reporter Dana Milbank making a case that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s excellent advice has been ignored by a naïve President Barack Obama and that Emanuel is the great unappreciated asset of a collapsing administration with a weak staff. Several other stories followed with the same theme, including a laudatory column by right-winger Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times, another article in the Post and yet another in The New York Times going off on the rest of the staff. While Milbank swore that Emanuel was not his source, it was obvious to anyone who knows how the Emanuel media network operates in Washington that the chief of staff’s “people” inspired this clumsy public relations blitz.
It is time for the proponents of the two-state solution to admit that the Palestinians have failed the test of history in staking their claim for statehood.\n\nA dispassionate evaluation of the events of the past two decades inexorably compels one toward an increasingly evident conclusion: The Palestinians seem far more focused on annulling Jewish political independence than attaining Palestinian political independence, far more committed to deconstruction of the Jewish state than to construction of a Palestinian one.
Bright pink salami cold cuts and tiny bottles of liquor make up the face of Boris Yeltsin. Madonna has a red kabbalah string for a mouth; Barbra Streisand a large black microphone for a nose. And Albert Einstein sports a mane of white electrical cables.
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