Princess Rebecca, of the Ladino kingdom of Galonia, appeared in an episode of Elena of Avalor that aired on December 6. Elena is a Latinx princess who is the centerpiece of the Emmy-winning, Disney Junior Channel series which debuted in 2016. Until now there has been no Jewish princess—not that there wasn’t an abundance of attractive candidates.
Yossi Shain is a Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University and a Professor of Comparative Government and Diaspora Politics at Georgetown University. His most recent book, The Israeli Century and the Israelization of Judaism, is currently a bestseller in Israel and will come out in English in 2020. Moment senior editor Laurence Wolff interviewed Shain in Tel Aviv.
The Israeli ex-pat community makes up anywhere from 300,000 to 800,000 members. Most are concentrated in New York and Los Angeles, rendering them useless in terms of electoral strategy. So why bother with this tiny sliver of a constituency?
Leonard Cohen blended the sacred and the profane in his own search for a deeper meaning—finding truth in the Torah, yes, but also in sex, travel and the simple thrill of artistic creation.
With just under a year to go, Trump, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would really like to fit in another one or two major moves—a grand peace plan, greenlighting Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley or the signing of a mutual defense treaty between the two countries.
The title of “biggest threat” to American Jews is hard to define or measure. And more importantly, it’s political. Most liberals would agree that anti-Semitism has reached new records under Trump and that the president’s response to the phenomenon has been less than adequate.
Jewishness is both unrelated to the Disney archive and, thanks to Walt Disney’s long-rumored yet long-denied anti-Semitism, inseparable from it.
He was incredibly picky. The photo album he made in the 1940s shows him dashingly handsome, in and out of New York City, in and out of baggy suits, Navy uniforms and bathing shorts, with girlfriends, pre-kiss, post-kiss. One annotation reads something like: “She had thoughts of marriage but he didn’t.” In his 30s, with two degrees and military service behind him, he was still in search of the perfect Jewish wife. This physicist, with a remarkably unique mind, drove his Kaiser to Manhattan from New Jersey on weekends to find her.
