With Israel’s election days away, Orthodox Jews swayed in prayer at a meeting of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, delaying his entrance while politicians waited politely. The image captured a sea change in Israeli politics. Orthodox Jews have left niche parties to join Likud and other mainstream factions, challenging the dominance of non-observant politicians…
An Israeli rabbi who is the spiritual head of a powerful ultra-Orthodox political party was taken to hospital with a suspected minor stroke on Saturday, 10 days before a general election. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who has largely set the terms under which his Shas party has agreed to join a succession of governments, was taken…
Israel’s political map is about to upended when Netanyahu and Liberman go on television at 2 p.m. Eastern time to announce a joint Knesset run. They’re apparently not merging their parties but forming a joint list. The aim is to ensure that Bibi ends up with the largest Knesset bloc after the January 22 elections,…
The spiritual leader of the Sephardi Orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, called on Jews to pray on Rosh Hashana for the destruction of Iran and Hezbollah. The call on Saturday night came more than a week after Yosef was briefed on the threat from Iran by the head of Israel’s National Security Council, Maj.-Gen….
It never ceases to amaze me how some so-called leaders will use women’s issues to advance their own agendas that have nothing to do with women. The overtly racist statements coming from the Shas government minister Eli Yishai last week in light of a Tel Aviv rape case were particularly troubling. When the police arrested…
In its 30 years of existence, Shas has evolved from a marginal ethnic political group to Israel’s fourth largest party in the Knesset and is today the unchallenged kingmaker of Israeli politics. Now, Shas — or in its full name, the Sephardic Torah Guardians Movement — is attempting to establish a beachhead among American Sephardic…
Economic upheaval and strife in Europe have historically begat fierce nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Faced with a serious debt crisis, severe budget cuts, grim austerity, rising unemployment and creeping inflation, the current depression is no exception. Since the fall of 2008, reported incidents of anti-Semitism have risen across the continent. In Britain, a record number…
The Israeli Presidential Conference, Shimon Peres’s vanity international blabfest, continues today with a series of panel discussions on the woes of the global economy and the future of the Jewish people. I don’t think we’ve solved the world’s economic problems, but there have been a few bombshells dropped into the field of Jewish identity. The…
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