One of the most remarkable things about covering Israeli politics is watching parties come and go. People have an amazing willingness to support a brand new party with no track record. Earlier this month Yair Lapid, journalist and icon of secular middle-class Israelis, announced he was entering politics. As the Forward reported, before he even…
Yair Lapid, anchor of Israel’s most popular weekend news show, columnist in the best-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot, author, screenwriter and one-time actor, is the self-styled voice of what he calls the “42%.” According to his calculation, this is the proportion of the population that is Jewish, secular and Zionist. It’s a political constituency for which…
It seems Israelis are reacting in very different ways to the very recent news that charismatic Yair Lapid is leaving journalism to enter politics. Unfortunately, one Israeli, someone apparently named Itzik Chen, wrote a death threat on Lapid’s Facebook wall. “Believe me, if I see you I’ll want to kill you. You are an anti-Semitic…
Prior to his announcement that he was leaving Israel’s Channel 2 to run for the Knesset, Yair Lapid, a popular Israeli media personality and son of the late Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, must have been encouraged by a Geocartography poll that placed an unnamed, hypothetical party led by him second, with 20 seats, behind only a…
Yair Lapid, one of Israel’s most influential journalists, wrote an important opinion piece (link is to the English translation) last week on Ynet, the Web site of Yediot Ahronot, reexamining the meaning of the Holocaust in Israel today. He says it’s time to step back, if only slightly, from the usual response of anger and…
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