Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an Independence Day message that he \”appreciate(s) deeply all that America has done for Israel.\”
I’ve just finished moderating two panels at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem. I’ve just finished talking to dozens of the people attending and finished listening to other people’s panels. I’m tired and have a headache, and I am still trying to figure out a theme coming out of the conference.
The United States will help Israel buy four more Iron Dome short-range anti-missile systems, a Pentagon official said.
President Obama will host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House for talks.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived in Israel, where he is expected to press Israel and the Palestinians to restart peace talks in the wake of increased unrest.
Events in Egypt are of \”deep concern,\” the Obama administration said, and its government should show restraint.
Rabbi Israel Dresner, 81, says he’s the most arrested rabbi in America. At least that was the case in the 1960s, he says, when Dresner was one of dozens of rabbis who answered the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for clergy from the North to join the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South. From the Freedom Rides of 1961 to the famous march in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965, when Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walked in the front row with King, Jews were prominent participants in the battle for civil rights that dominated the first half of the \’60s.
Lawyers for convicted former Agriprocessors executive Sholom Rubashkin have appealed a judge\’s decision denying their bid for a new trial. In a brief filed Monday with the U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis, Mo., lawyers for Rubashkin made four arguments on his behalf, chief among them that the presiding judge in his case, Linda Reade, should have recused herself. Reade had rejected that argument in October. Rubashkin was convicted in 2009 on 86 counts of fraud related to his management of the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, and later was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison.
Steven Rakitt, the president and CEO of The Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, has been named to head the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. Rakitt was approved unanimously as the new executive vice president and CEO of the Washington federation, it was announced in a statement issued Tuesday. He will begin in his new position in February. He replaces Misha Galperin, who left the Washington federation in late spring to head the North American operations of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Israel was prepared to extend a West Bank construction freeze, but the United States withdrew the idea, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
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