Kathleen Peratis
By Kathleen Peratis
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Opinion Gaza’s ‘Tunnel Economy’ Is Booming
In early November, Muhammad Al Qotati, a worker at the smuggling tunnels in Rafah, Gaza, welcomed my friend, journalist Nick Pelham, and me to a walk-around. The area he showed us is less than half a mile from the town of Rafah and about the distance of a football field from Egypt; it looks a…
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Opinion What Is the Wording?
This fall, the Palestine Liberation Organization will ask the 192 member states of the United Nations to declare an independent state of Palestine. In my view, this is a bad idea; if I could, I would stop it. But since the peace process (apparently) is dead and it is unlikely that anything will occur to…
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Opinion Schools and Chicken Coops Aren’t Security Threats
Fawzi Yusef, a farmer in the West Bank village of Yanun, has been unable to reach his olive groves near the Itamar settlement for more than 10 years due to a “military closure.” He might have taken hope from a 2006 decision by Israel’s High Court of Justice. The court ruled that the Israel Defense…
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Opinion On the Egypt-Israel Border, a Modern Exodus
Last month, as Jews around the world prepared for Passover, Egyptian border guards were killing migrants trying to cross into Israel. How many of us, as we sat at our Seder tables, were even aware of the dramatic parallel to the Passover story taking place on the present-day Egyptian-Israeli border? Most of those trying to…
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Opinion After Durban II, Egg on Our Faces
By any conventional standard the declaration issued at the conclusion of the Durban II global conference on racism, held in Geneva in late April, was a signal — and a very, very positive — achievement. It is forward-looking in its commitment to protect victims of racism, includes significant new protections for migrants, omits the pernicious…
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Opinion Georgia Is on Our Minds, But Abuses Are Ignored
Georgia has been America’s darling in the Caucasus since its charismatic and telegenic young president, Mikheil Saakashvili, took over from the nasty old Russian-style despot Eduard Shevardnadze in the fall of 2003, in what came to be called the Rose Revolution (because Saakashvili carried a rose, and not an AK-47, as he and the throngs…
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Opinion Get Used to More Davids Becoming Dianes
You have to hand it to Rep. Barney Frank, the man knows how to empathize. In the first-ever congressional hearing on workplace discrimination against transgender people, held by the House in late June in an Education and Labor subcommittee, Frank said he understands what it means to be trapped in the wrong body — because…
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Opinion Even the Scary and the Weird Have Rights
This is not the column I expected to write this week. I expected to cluck-cluck about the shameful, officially sanctioned kidnapping of the more than 450 children from the compound of the Fundamentalist LDS church in El Dorado, Texas, and to compare the deprivation of their rights to Guantanamo Bay. I expected to decry the…
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Fast Forward ‘Rabbi rebellion’: 33 Orthodox rabbis endorse Harris
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Opinion I was a Bernie supporter. This year, I’m voting Trump. Here’s why liberal Jews like me made the switch
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Opinion Here’s why Orthodox Jews are loyal to Trump — even if they don’t love him
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FIRST PERSON As a rabbi, he helped others mourn. So why wouldn’t his daughter say kaddish for him?
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