By Phyllis Chesler (Written with the help of Fern Sidman)

As a child, my mother took me to the Radio City Music Hall to see the dazzling, long-limbed Rockettes dance. For decades, the Music Hall symbolized glitzy entertainment, New York style. Radio City was also where I went when I was interviewed on NBC and when I dined at the Big Band-era Rainbow Room, a 65th floor precursor to and survivor of the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World. The Rainbow Room also has windows that look out onto the immediate world.

On Wednesday evening, May 7th, Jews around the world celebrated the miraculous 60th anniversary of the birth of Israel as a modern state. In New York City, an historic extravaganza took place at Radio City Music Hall. An attempt to Palestinianize this Art Deco palace also took place. It failed, it did not interrupt the considerable joy within but still, the Haters are everywhere, there is no event they do not picket.

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By Fern Sidman

As Jews around the world celebrated the 60th anniversary of the birth of Israel as a modern state, the annual Yom Ha’Atzmaout (Israeli Independence Day) festivities in New York took place amidst a backdrop of controversy and protest outside of Radio City Music Hall on Wednesday evening May 7th.

At a gala, star studded musical event sponsored by the UJA-Federation, thousands of supporters of Israel filed into the landmark edifice to hear a historic mix of all star talent including Israeli stars David Broza, Idan Raichel, Rami Kleinstein, Habanot Nechama and Yael Naim. Also appearing on the bill were top American performer and Hasidic reggae phenomenon Matisyahu, recent MacArthur Genius Award winner John Zorn and “Late Show With David Letterman” band-leader Paul Shaffer. The event also included a moving tribute to Israel’s fallen soldiers and victims of terror as part of Israel’s Memorial Day.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Two religiously-identified new states emerged from the shards of the British empire in the aftermath of World War II. Israel, of course, was one; the other was Pakistan.

They make an interesting, if infrequently-compared pair. Pakistan’s experience with widespread poverty, near-constant internal turmoil, and external tensions, culminating in its current status as near-rogue state, suggests the perils that Israel avoided, with its stable, liberal political culture, dynamic economy, cutting-edge high-tech sector, lively culture, and impressive social cohesion.

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By Phyllis Chesler

I can’t remember a time when Israel was not central to my imagination both as a model for heroism and as a transcendent, miraculous, reality. From childhood on, Zionism was an ever-evolving example of political, theological, historical, and personal liberation.

I was born in 1940 and grew up in an Orthodox family in Borough Park. In 1946, I started learning Hebrew. And, in 1948, I “rebelled.” I joined Hashomer Ha’Tzair, a left-wing socialist Zionist youth group. Within a few years, I joined Ain Harod, a group to the left of Hashomer. In the early 1950s, I packed machine gun parts for Israel. Both Hashomer and Ain Harod shared a vision of Jews and Arabs living together in the Holy Land. This utopian, agrarian vision, this defiant form of idealism, got me embroiled in dangerous adventures in the Islamic world but in Israel too.

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A film by Aish.com: Israel Then And Now - 60 Years in 60 Seconds:

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by Ilan Pappé
Oneworld Publications, 2006. 256 pp. $27.50

Book review by Seth J. Frantzman*

Flunking History

Among many Israeli academics and Western revisionists, it has become fashionable to examine Israel’s war of independence from an Arab perspective in which Jews were the aggressors and Arabs the victims.[1] This trend began in 1989 with works by Ben-Gurion University professor Benny Morris[2] and Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim,[3] and developed further with the writings of the late Hebrew University anthropologist Baruch Kimmerling,[4] Neve Gordon[5] at Ben-Gurion University, and Meron Benvenisti,[6] a political scientist who served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem between 1971 and 1978.

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by Steven Shamrak

There are many lands around the world that have been occupied not so long ago by other countries. Many of them are still subjugated to the rule of an occupying power. They were conquered during offensive or defensive wars, throughout the process of establishment of statehood or as a part of colonial and imperial policy. The following is a far from complete list of the currently occupied lands:

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by Diana Muir*

“A land without a people for a people without a land” is one of the most oft-cited phrases in the literature of Zionism—and perhaps also the most problematic. Anti-Zionists cite the phrase as a perfect encapsulation of the fundamental injustice of Zionism: that early Zionists believed Palestine was uninhabited,[1] that they denied—and continue to reject—the existence of a distinct Palestinian culture,[2] and even as evidence that Zionists always planned on an ethnic cleansing of the Arab population.[3] Such assertions are without basis in fact: They both deny awareness on the part of early Zionists of the presence of Arabs in Palestine and exaggerate the coalescence of a Palestinian national identity, which in reality only developed in reaction to Zionist immigration.[4] Nor is it true, as many anti-Zionists still assert, that early Zionists widely employed the phrase.

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by Asaf Romirowsky*

The Palestinian narrative sees Israel’s 1948 War of Independence as the al Naqba — “the catastrophe.” The birth of a sovereign Jewish state is perceived to be the root of all evil because this supposedly solidified how the small Jewish community robbed the Palestinians of their land.

That is the recurring mantra found in Arab historiography — a hypersensitive focus on discrimination and inequality. In general, Arab scholars tend to ignore the huge corpus of materials found in the archives on the war and zoom in on what are legitimate or illegitimate claims, using U.N. resolutions as the be all and end all.

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By Fern Sidman

Several renowned academics and researchers participated in a most revealing and highly informative event on Sunday, March 30th entitled, “Columbia and the Nazis: New Research, New Concerns”. The event, designated as a special session of the Organization of American Historians annual conference was held at The Center for Jewish History in Manhattan and was sponsored by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

The session was chaired by esteemed historian and prolific author, Dr. Rafael Medoff. Dr. Medoff is the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and has recently co-authored a book with former New York City Mayor Ed Koch titled, “The Koch Papers: My Fight Against Anti-Semitism” (Palgrave MacMillan).

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by Daniel Pipes*

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, and Barack Obama’s pastor since 1988, told his congregation in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001 that U.S. terrorism had precipitated Al-Qaeda’s attack. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards.” Wright concluded that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

That last phrase has a history.

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by Steven Shamrak

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” - Edmund Burke

“…Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.” - Pastor Martin Niemöller

In his book “My Life”, Adolf Hitler clearly described his vision of the future of the Jews in Europe. By 1939 his anti-Semitic and xenophobic vision became reality. Concentration camps were built to detain communists, socialists, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and others. Disabled children and adults were ‘relieved’ of their lives as a part of the systematic campaign of German national purification. (Please visit and view the chronology of the Holocaust.)

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by Daniel Pipes*

Startling developments in Gaza highlight the need for a change in Western policy toward this troubled territory of 1.3 million persons.

Gaza’s contemporary history began in 1948, when Egyptian forces overran the British-controlled area and Cairo sponsored the nominal “All-Palestine Government” while de facto ruling the territory as a protectorate. That arrangement ended in 1967, when the Israeli leadership defensively took control of Gaza, reluctantly inheriting a densely populated, poor, and hostile territory.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Liberal fascism sounds like an oxymoron — or a term for conservatives to insult liberals. Actually, it was coined by a socialist writer, none other than the respected and influential left-winger H.G. Wells, who in 1931 called on fellow progressives to become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” Really.

His words, indeed, fit a much larger pattern of fusing socialism with fascism: Mussolini was a leading socialist figure who, during World War I, turned away from internationalism in favor of Italian nationalism and called the blend Fascism. Likewise, Hitler headed the National Socialist German Workers Party.

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By Phyllis Chesler

Full Circle: A Memoir, by Edith Kurzweil (Transaction Publishers, 312 pp., $34.95)

Edith Kurzweil has lived many lives and prevailed against tremendous odds. As an Austrian Jew, she was not meant to live at all; as a first-generation immigrant in America, she wasn’t expected to succeed; as a woman, who was also a 1950s-style wife and mother, she was not supposed to become a scholar in her own right. But Kurzweil refused to identify herself as a victim, choosing instead to view adversity as a useful challenge. She earned a Ph.D. in sociology, became a professor, and published a number of thoughtful books including The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective, The Age of Structuralism, and Nazi Laws and Jewish Lives: Letters from Vienna. She also married three times, the final time to William Phillips, the founder of Partisan Review. Kurzweil served as executive editor of this highly influential magazine from the late 1970s until its demise in 2003.

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