It all started with Signora Grazia, an elderly cheese maker in Panzano, Italy. While vacationing in this Tuscan village, just 30 minutes south of Florence, we walked by her farm early one morning and saw the sign that read “Pecorino and Fresh Ricotta for Sale.”
Who would have thought that a noncontact sport invented by a Jewish high school kid in the 1960s would someday find its way to Israel and be used to build bridges between bitter enemies? Founded in 2008 by veteran American Ultimate Frisbee players, Ultimate Peace (UP) is a weeklong overnight camp open to boys and girls ages 13 to 15 with a mission to help improve relations between Israelis, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, one flying disc at a time.
Valley Beth Shalom’s Prom Prep 101, Friendship Circle
“Mommy, can I have some water?” asked Joshua Goldenberg, a 7-year-old with a beautiful mane of curls and a gap-tooth smile. His mother, Christie, handed him a bottle. “How do you know it’s water?” he asked. “Because it says so on the label,” she answered.
In his speech at the State Department on Thursday, President Barack Obama addressed the rapidly changing situation in the Middle East and put forward Israel’s pre-1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations that would yield a future Palestinian state.
President Obama’s advisers have said time and again that the major speech he is to deliver Thursday will not be about Israel, but about the Middle East. Jewish groups must wait until Friday, when Obama meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Sunday, when the president addresses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, for the president\’s message for Israel, the advisers said.
Limmud-Oz, the Australian arm of the global festival of Jewish learning, has barred presenters who advocate a boycott of Israel. Less than a month before the popular two-day festival opens in Sydney, Limmud-Oz’s program director, Michael Misrachi, issued a statement this week saying that the executive of Limmud-Oz believes “that the BDS campaign is an attack on Israel’s basic legitimacy and harms the Jewish people as a whole.”
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