Former Prime Minister—now President—Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist Party are more powerful than ever. Is the nation’s democracy under siege? By Yigal Schleifer [dropcap]A[/dropcap]diminutive 63-year-old with dyed blond hair and a raspy smoker’s cough, Mücella Yapici hardly fits the profile of a criminal mastermind. But Turkish judicial...
Turkish President Erdogan’s irrational behavior is about power, not religion. ...
French anti-Semitism, c’est une vieille histoire. True, following the Revolution, les Juifs were liberated from their ghettos. True, the Jewish Leon Blum was elected prime minister of France during the late 1930s. And true, except for the United States and Israel, no other country contains...
Be wary of historical fiction, especially if it’s good. It will forever mix up in your mind what actually happened, or what we can be fairly certain happened, with the inventions of playwrights and novelists, whose aim might be to draw a deeper meaning from...
Today, the Palestinian enclave of Gaza is known as a flashpoint for conflict that far eclipses its minuscule size. At 140 square miles—sharing an eight-mile frontier with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and hugging Israel’s border for nearly 32 miles—the sliver of desert is only twice the...
The Sunni extremist group in Syria and Iraq could cause turmoil in the entire Middle East. ...
Militants sever the ties that connect the region to the world—and history by Amy E. Schwartz In 2010, Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, paid a visit to historic Aleppo, Syria to see the triumphant conclusion of a 10-year restoration and conservation of the historic citadel. “Aleppo...
Should Israelis befriend moderate Sunnis such as the Saudis, or the region’s outcasts? by Gabriel Scheinmann At the United Nations in early fall, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world” could not only help defeat the twin threats of...
Even today, many Jewish women leaders are afraid to speak out with self-assurance. by Letty Cottin Pogrebin Sometimes, words speak louder than actions. Women have proliferated lately in the top ranks of Jewish leadership. They’re leaders in synagogues, Jewish communal organizations and media outlets. Four out of the...
Netanyahu and Israel are stuck in the status quo as the Palestinians go in another direction. by Nahum Barnea We’re living in a period of dramatic change, but that doesn’t mean there will be changes in Israel’s politics, particularly the politics of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin...