Jo-Ann Mort writes frequently about Israel and the Occupied Territories, most recently for The Washington Post opinion page and The New Republic about the current government.
Jo-Ann Mort
By Jo-Ann Mort
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Culture A Holocaust Memoir, Minus the Holocaust
Irving Howe wrote that after reading Italian writer Primo Levi, he wanted “to start having a conversation with him.” Bela Zsolt’s memoir of his time spent as a member of a Hungarian labor brigade in the Ukraine and later in the Nagyvarad Ghetto near the Romanian border during World War II gave me the same…
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Culture A Call to Liberals To Take Back the Light
‘The separation of Church and State does not mean the segregation of religion from the public discourse,” Evangelical Christian Minister Jim Wallis said in a recent interview with the Forward. Wallis –– who lives in Washington, D.C., with his sons and wife, the Rev. Joy Carroll (the first woman to be ordained in the Church…
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Culture An Israeli Designer Embroiders Fashion and Politics
When Americans think of Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, they’re likely to think of the circle with the colorful fountain. But for Israeli women-in-the-know, Dizengoff is the shopping area to the far north, where boutiques of top-end Israeli designers line the street. And there is comme il faut, a trendy boutique, café and “concept store,”…
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News Children of Foreign Workers Stuck Living in Legal Limbo
LETTER FROM SOUTH TEL AVIV TEL AVIV — “It’s really strange that a lot of young people are so frustrated with the situation in Israel that they want to get out of here — and I want to stay,” said Emmanuel Srisuren, 26. “It seems so unfair.” Born in Israel to Filipino and Thai parents,…
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News Weaving the Triangle Shirtwaist Tragedy Into its Rightful Place
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America By David Von Drehle Atlantic Monthly Press, 340 pages, $26. * * *| March 25, 1911, became a Sabbath like no other. Scores of young immigrant Jewish women who couldn’t afford a day of rest went to work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a newfangled high-rise factory on the…
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News Labor Boss Finds Himself Kingmaker of the Israeli Left
TEL AVIV — Amir Peretz, chairman of the Histadrut labor federation, is a hot commodity these days, to the apparent surprise of just about everybody but him. He’s emerged as the main threat to Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial budget reforms. His name is spoken with awe on the streets of Israel’s urban slums and…
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Opinion What is the Jewish State to the Children of Israel?
Recently I was asked to give a talk to my Reform synagogue’s bar and bat Mitzvah class. My Brooklyn neighborhood of brownstones and apartment buildings, nestled on the edge of Prospect Park, is a liberal, gentrified enclave, with a handful of Conservative and Reform synagogues within a several block radius. My synagogue has more than…
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News In New CD, Israel’s Musical Soul Peers at Those Living in Shadows
‘Artists should be individuals, look for their own way, their own language to express themselves,” Israeli singer Chava Alberstein insists. “No one artist represents” all of Israeli culture. Still, it may be fair to say that if one singer has come to personify Israel through the years, it’s Alberstein. With her mane of curly blond…
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