Abe Silberstein is the Associate Director, North America, of The Abraham Initiatives, an Israel-based NGO working to achieve equality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. He tweets @abesilbe. His views and opinions do not reflect those of his employer.
Abe Silberstein
By Abe Silberstein
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Opinion Biden’s living in the past. That’s a good thing.
In an America supposedly polarized to the point of overwrought civil war references, President-Elect Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is terribly out of sync. Throughout the primary and general campaigns and through Saturday’s night victory speech, the former two-term Vice President and 36-year veteran of the U.S. Senate spoke of restoring bipartisanship and civility. “To make…
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Opinion Stop saying Biden will restore bipartisanship on Israel. There’s no going back.
Last year, the U.S. State Department reversed its decades-old finding that Israeli settlements in territories occupied following the 1967 war were in contravention of international law. In so doing, the Trump administration overturned the consensus view of mainstream international law scholars. Now the administration has moved from word to deed: On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin…
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Opinion Should former Trump officials be welcomed back to polite society? It depends.
Toward the end of the 2016 campaign, when it appeared certain that Hillary Clinton would make history as the nation’s first woman president, a running joke on Twitter depicted the dilemma of Trump campaign officials seeking work after November: An imagined job interviewer, seeing a peculiar resume gap that covered the presidential campaign season, inquired…
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Opinion Despite Armenia’s emotional appeals, American and Israeli interests are with Azerbaijan
For another take on how Jews should engage with the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, click here. The ceasefire announced Friday in Moscow between Armenia and Azerbaijan is already coming under considerable stress. But even if it holds up, it is hard to see this long-frozen conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region going back into hibernation. An assertive Turkey,…
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Opinion What to do with the Trump Jews?
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how the American Jewish community will grapple with the post-Trump era, which I hope and believe is months rather than years away. Leaders of mainstream Jewish institutions appear to be too sanguine about the health of communal discourse. Two news items this week put the…
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Opinion The lesson of Trump’s RNC speech: The Left needs to put its issues on hold for now
In response to the prominent placement of people of color at the Republican convention, wildly disproportionate to their ranks in the party, liberal commentators painted the GOP’s pretensions to diversity as a way to reassure center-right white suburbanites that they aren’t racist for supporting President Trump. There is definitely some truth to this. A double-digit…
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Opinion Trump, not Israel, is the biggest divider among Jews
When speaking of political divides in the American Jewish community, it’s all too easy to get sucked into a conversation about Israel. The truth is, though Israel, home to half of the world’s Jews, is not unimportant to American Jewry, it is not the most challenging issue the American Jewish community faces in the coming…
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Opinion Annexation was never a real threat. The UAE-Israel deal proves it.
The abrupt announcement from the White House on Thursday that the United Arab Emirates would begin normalizing ties with Israel in exchange for Israel “suspending” plans to annex parts of the West Bank came as an unexpected shock. While a subsequent statement from the UAE was considerably more toned down and merely spoke of a…
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