The captain and first mate of the Mavi Marmara, the ship which led the Gaza flotilla raided by Israel Defense Forces special forces last week, had attempted to prevent premeditated violent clashes between activists and the Israeli military, evidence released Friday showed.
This past Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a wide-ranging speech at an Orthodox Union event in Washington, D.C. The senator’s lecture touched on areas such as Iran’s nuclear program, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and several domestic policy issues.
When historian Deborah Lipstadt was sued for libel in 1996 for calling über-revisionist David Irving a Holocaust-denier, she engaged the services of a British solicitor named Anthony Julius. The defense against Irving\’s lawsuit was successful, and Irving himself was officially adjudged to be not only a Holocaust-denier but also a racist and an anti-Semite.
A new anthology, titled “Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires,” includes essays by 14 women who identify themselves as part of the GLBQT community. Some remain part of the frum community, and write anonymously. One is from a prominent politically conservative family and talks about her family’s gradual acceptance process of her and her non-Jewish partner. One woman easily passes as a man in Israel, while she doesn’t in America. While most of the essays are personal coming-out stories, one is a scholarly review of Torah sources and Jewish legal literature on lesbianism.
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