Journalist Gal Beckerman has been awarded the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for his first book. Beckerman will receive the Jewish Book Council\’s first prize award of $100,000 for \”When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.\” The non-fiction book is a comprehensive chronicle of the history of the Soviet Jewry movement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s two greatest enemies are The New York Times and Haaretz, the editor of The Jerusalem Post said in a speech.
Veteran Israeli journalist Yair Lapid has left his job as a television news anchor to enter politics
The Polish journalist and commentator Leopold Unger has died at the age of 89.
I had been abused and beaten and had my camera confiscated all in the confines of the cabinet building, the headquarters of Egypt’s nascent democracy. Now, for the better part of an hour, I was languishing in a makeshift holding pen somewhere at the entrance of the building.
Journalist Marilyn Henry, an authority on German reparations and the recovery of Jewish properties looted and displaced in Europe during the Nazi and communist eras, has died. Henry, of Teaneck, N.J., died of cancer on Tuesday, four days before her 58th birthday.
Ask anyone who knew him: Daniel Pearl loved music. He joined bands in Atlanta, Paris and Mumbai, relishing the way a good melody can draw people together. So imagine how the slain Wall Street Journal reporter, killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, might have felt watching the second-period choir class at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School as its members stand, roll their shoulders back and belt out a lilting rendition of “Seasons of Love” from the musical “Rent.”
The New York Times apologized for allowing a writer who has attended pro-Palestinian rallies to co-author a story claiming that Jewish criticism of Israel has grown in the San Francisco region. The Feb. 3 article, headlined \”A Jewish Group Makes Waves, Locally and Abroad,\” covered tensions among Jews in the area. It focused particularly on Jewish Voice for Peace, which is noncommittal on whether Israel should become a binational state.
Helen Thomas’ decision to take her disparagement of Zionists from off the cuff (last May) to on the record (last month) has led a journalists\’ group to consider dropping her name from a lifetime achievement award. The Society of Professional Journalists is revisiting its decision last summer not to change the name of its Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award after Thomas, 90, told an Arab-American group in Dearborn, Mich., last month that Congress, the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street “are owned by the Zionists.” Thomas, a 67-year-veteran of Washington reporting, resigned from her job as a columnist at Hearst last June after remarking to a video blogger that Jews “should get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany and the United States. She later apologized, but her remarks in Michigan on Dec. 2 have raised fresh concerns about the sincerity of the apology.
“It was Shabbat yesterday,” Jeffrey Goldberg said as explanation for why he had delayed an interview with a Jewish newspaper. But his next line pretty much foiled the excuse: “I had a lot of soccer games to go to.”
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