Why bother being Jewish?


    Why should American Jews bother to be Jewish? According to a new Pew Research Center survey of the American Jewish community, more and more American Jews have reached the conclusion that there is no reason to be Jewish.   Outside of the Orthodox Jewish community, intermarriage rates have reached 71 percent. Thirty-two percent of Jews born since 1980…

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America and the good psychopaths


In his speech on Tuesday before the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tried to get the Americans to stop their collective swooning at the sight of an Iranian president who smiled in their general direction. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the premier warned, “I wish I could believe [President Hassan] Rouhani, but I don’t because facts are stubborn things. And…

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Obama’s power and its limitations


US President Barack Obama’s rapidly changing positions on Syria have produced many odd spectacles. One of odder ones was the sight of hundreds of lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee fanning out on Capitol Hill to lobby members of the House and Senate to support Obama’s plan to launch what Secretary of State John Kerry called “unbelievably small”…

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Syria and the North Korean Model


Did US President Barack Obama score a great victory for the United States by concluding a deal with Russia on Syria’s chemical weapons or has he caused irreparable harm to the US’s reputation and international position? By what standard can we judge his actions when the results will only be known next year? To summarize where things now stand, last…

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Israel’s Twenty Year Nightmare


Twenty years ago today, Israel’s so-called peace process with the PLO was officially ushered in at the White House Rose Garden. A year or so later, when the death toll of Israeli victims of the massive terror offensive that the PLO organized shortly afterwards reached what then seemed unbearable heights, a popular call went out to “Put the Oslo Criminals…

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Obama’s Bread and Circuses


Over the past week, President Barack Obama and his senior advisers have told us that the US is poised to go to war against Syria. In the next few days, the US intends to use its air power and guided missiles to attack Syria in response to the regime’s use of chemical weapons in the outskirts of Damascus last week.…

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Resetting US foreign policy


Aside from the carnage in Benghazi, the most enduring image from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US secretary of state was the fake remote control she brought with her to Moscow in 2009 with the word “Reset” in misspelled Russian embossed on it. Clinton’s gimmick was meant to show that under President Barack Obama, American foreign policy would be fundamentally transformed.…

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Latma will be back


Below is the final episode of the Tribal Update, Latma’s flagship satirical newscast. We launched the show 4 years ago. During this period, we produced more than 200 shows. It is a production record without peer in Israeli television history. Over the past three years, we have been in on again, off again negotiations with Israel public television Channel 1…

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Best of the Tribal Update, part 1


After 200 episodes, the Tribal Update, Latma’s flagship satirical newscast is coming to a close. We were supposed to be broadcast on Israel TV’s Channel 1 as the station’s prime time satire show. We were approved by all the professional committees not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 times over the past two years. Time after time, they told…

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Bibi and the true believers


Standing next to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni gushed that through his indefatigable efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian officials to Washington, Kerry proved that “nothing can stop true believers.” As usual, the cognitively challenged Livni told us something she hadn’t intended to say. The term “true believer” was coined by Eric…

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