13 May
2011 March-April, Arts & Culture, Israel, Talk of the Table

Lebanon vs. Israel: A Delicious Culinary War

The Lebanese counterattack on Israel was carefully planned, precisely organized and ruthlessly executed by an army of 300. The mission: Unseat Israel as the hummus champion of the world. On May 8, 2010, 300 Lebanese chefs armed with state-of-the-art spatulas achieved a new Guinness World Record by whipping up a 10-ton batch of the chickpea spread, history’s largest. A “hummus war” has been waging since 2006, when Sabra, the hummus company whose name is Hebrew slang for “Israeli-born” and which is partly owned by the Israel-based Strauss Group, served up the first Guinness-worthy batch. The feat inspired chefs in both countries to one-up each other in a series of chickpea smash-offs. Silly as the competition sounds, it unearthed a passionate debate about who invented the ubiquitous Middle Eastern dip. Although few Israelis would go so far as...

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05 Dec
2011 March-April, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

From the Editor

Nearly three years ago, I met a 90-year-old woman from Cleveland named Eva Rosenberg who told me her story—and that of her late husband Milton Rosenberg. In 1950, one month after Julius Rosenberg was arrested for spying for the Soviet Union, Eva’s husband and his colleague, Sidney Rosenberg—neither of whom were communists or had any association with Julius Rosenberg—were both dismissed from their engineering jobs at the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. These were innocent men—with the wrong name at the wrong time in the wrong place—who had to fight to redeem their reputations—and their jobs. They eventually got their positions back, but neither spoke publicly about what had happened. Eva Rosenberg remains afraid—even after all these years—that bringing this story to light might lead the federal government to revoke her...

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05 Dec
2011 March-April, Israel

Whither Israel’s Grand Strategies?

Mainstream Sunni Arab countries—traditionally adversaries of Israel—are now its potential allies in the struggle against Iran and militant Islam.   One of the signal characteristics of Israel’s security thinking in the country’s early decades was its development of grand strategies—concepts for coordinating the nation’s resources toward attaining its existential objectives in war and peace. It would be hard to find another country anywhere that, starting from scratch, honed its strategic thinking to such a degree in order to deal with adversity. Beginning even before independence in 1948, David Ben-Gurion and a handful of aides and advisors sought to develop a series of concepts for overcoming the hostility of the entire Arab world. Judging by Israel’s triumph and rise to prosperity through the decades, they did a good job. Yet a brief reexamination of those original grand strategies (italicized below),...

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05 Dec
2011 March-April, Israel

Women Get the Front Seat

Israel’s High Court agreed that gender separation on Israeli public buses violated the principles of equality, individual rights and freedom of religion.   In 2004, I embarked on what I thought was going to be a simple 30-minute bus ride from the center of Jerusalem to my home in Ramot. Instead, it became a dramatic seven-year journey sparked by a humiliating and threatening verbal battering from an ultra-Orthodox man after I adamantly rejected his unreasonable demands to give up my seat and move to the back of the bus. I am happy to relate that the ordeal ended in triumph in Israel’s Supreme Court this January. But it was a bumpy ride, traversing along the way some of the most urgent women’s rights issues in Israel today. In 2007, I became one of five Orthodox women who filed suit...

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16 Nov
2011 March-April, World

Anti-Muslim Discrimination in Post 9/11 America

Muslims have replaced Jews as targets of discrimination During the 1940s and 1950s, some Jewish scientists were stripped of their security clearances, causing them to lose their jobs or be downgraded to lower-security projects. One of the most famous cases was that of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atom bomb,” who lost his clearance in 1954 because he had belonged to a group that also included communist members. “I think it is desirable that the U.S. population, especially its younger members, be reminded of that historical hysteria,” says Edward Gerjuoy, emeritus professor of physics at University of Pittsburgh and a former chair of the American Physical Society Committee on the International Freedom of Scientists. Today, Muslims are more likely than Jews to lose security clearances, says Sheldon Cohen, a security clearance lawyer...

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