InDepth

The name Radegast Station might not be familiar to most people.

Last week my eldest daughter called me from Israel, where she is studying for a year in seminary, crying and terribly distraught. A girl she was friendly with from another seminary had died of anorexia. She was seventeen years old.

One moderate Muslim voice, a brave Bangladeshi journalist, has withstood years of unfair persecution in Dhaka for supporting Israel. He's been jailed and beaten, and as he now prepares to stand trial for his life, it's time for the world community to act.

"I don't want to learn and that's it! I go to yeshiva all week and I need a break!" Your son storms off and slams the door. All you had done was innocently ask him to learn on Shabbos afternoon. Your son, however, felt like a parolee asked to go back into solitary confinement. This is, to say the least, a painful experience for both father and son.

Israel is trying to reinvent itself. Two weeks ago, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni hosted a conference where she launched a new multi-million dollar project to "rebrand" Israel. As Livni put it, since coming into office, she has been struck by the disparity between the vibrant, liberal, free Israel she knows and Israel's image abroad.

The landmark meeting of the first Global Rabbinic Task Force on Agunot, scheduled to be held in Jerusalem this week, was the culmination of a decades-long struggle by the International Council of Jewish Women (ICJW) to facilitate such a rabbinical summit. Its last-minute cancellation by Israeli Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar has disappointed all of us, but is most devastating for the world's agunot - those women who remain trapped in broken Jewish marriages because their husbands refuse to give them the necessary halachic divorce document (get).

In April 2004, Ilan Pappe, the left-wing Israeli academic and self-described anti-Zionist, told Haaretz that post-Zionism, which appeared dead as a doornail after nearly four years of non-stop Palestinian violence, would rise again.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to free imprisoned terrorist Marwan Barghouti. Her argument, it would appear, is that the Tanzim leader remains very popular among the Palestinians, and that he is the only Fatah representative who could successfully supplant the Hamas-led government.

Offensive Parade   It's gratifying to hear that the planned gay parade in Israel will meet with massive resistance from Jews, Muslims and Christians (news...

Its origins are in the medieval Spanish kingdom of Castille, in the early thirteenth century, well before Columbus left for the Americas.

The deplorable state of Middle East Studies on college campuses has been a topic of grave concern for many of those who follow the declining fortunes of American scholarship. That an entire field of academic study has grown up in the last quarter-century that seeks to delegitimize Zionism and Israel is not news. But efforts to do something about it are worth mentioning.

There are ill winds of change hovering on the horizon. Washington is signaling its intention to distance itself from Israel. Pressures are being imposed on Israel to make further unilateral concessions to Mahmoud Abbas, most of which would directly impact on its security.

I'm hooked. Truly hooked. Not on drugs, thank goodness, or cigarettes or alcohol. But hooked I most definitely am, and that makes me dependent after a wonderful life of carefree indifference. Fate's ultimate payback. So what am I hooked on? What addiction is this?

Dear Mr. President, I am writing to you because I am afraid. I have been closely following the rhetoric of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the past few months, and I want you to know that I am gripped with a sense of fear.

The Monitor never quite understood the good feelings Condoleezza Rice managed to inspire among so many conservatives for what seemed like the longest time. The woman never uttered a single word on foreign policy – her alleged area of expertise – that could even remotely be described as original, inspiring, or just plain memorable.

On the eve of her expected reelection victory, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton met with the editorial board of The Jewish Press.

Muslims And Double Standards    When an obscure Danish newspaper published a caricature mocking Muhammed, the Muslim world erupted in violent protest and effigies of...

We Jews have experienced so much pain in our long and arduous history that the pain of Islamic terrorism seems to be just another episode of indescribable suffering. To an extent, this is certainly true. For the moment, we must endure, and - in the end - we shall prevail. So it has been before; so it will be again.

An exhibit commemorating the Jewish community of Czestochowa, which has been traveling the world for the past two years, culminated in the gathering of more than 200 people who went there for a special reunion during Sukkot. These remnants and descendants of a community of more than 30,000 came from the U.S., Israel, South America, Australia and Europe.

Ben is sensitive and tries hard to please Miriam, but when there's a problem that needs to be dealt with, he seems oblivious. When she asks for input on a decision, he says, "It's up to you." He wants to be nice but he doesn't realize he's frustrating her.

In March 2004 Al Qaeda won its first parliamentary election in Europe. It installed the trailing candidate José Luis Zapatero as prime minister of Spain. It clinched this victory just three days before the election by exploding 10 bombs causing the death of 191 people and the wounding of 1,700 others.

In April 2001, I visited my daughter Ali, then a fifteen-year-old student at Phillips Academy in Andover, near Boston. We went to the Holocaust Memorial near Quincy Market in downtown Boston, and I was taken aback by a seemingly innocuous but in fact outrageous statement engraved in stone: "By late 1942, the United States and its Allies were aware of the death camps but did nothing to destroy them."

The warning signs are everywhere, yet no one wishes to see them. Israel's foes are gearing up for war, and it's time we opened our eyes to the danger that confronts us.

If most of the public opinion polls are to be believed, the Republican Party is careening toward a shellacking of historic proportions in next month’s midterm elections. Given the state of the Iraq war, a series of scandals involving Republicans, and the general mood of discontent that seems to have settled over the country, few will be surprised if the polls prove accurate.

Helping Jews    We now know that some of the money raised by the UJC (Federation) to aid Israel in the wake of the recent...

There is no easy answer to the question of ongoing Iranian nuclearization. All options are unappealing, and all will have very substantial costs. For the moment, diplomacy still seems to be the preferred path to crisis remediation, but only because polite conversation and empty threats protect all parties from taking easily identifiable risks.

During Chol Hamoed Sukkot the sound of singing in a sukkah was heard in Czestochowa for the first time since the Shoah.

The American Orthodox Jewish community of today is drastically different from the community that existed in America 75 years ago.

The loudest debate going on in the American Jewish world the last couple of months seems to revolve, believe it or not, around ads in Jewish weekly newspapers.

Thanks to Fred Lebow, founder of the New York City Marathon, some 500,000 Americans will run in marathons this year. In my book Anything for a T-Shirt: Fred Lebow and the New York City Marathon, the World's Greatest Footrace (Syracuse University Press, 2004), I show how Lebow, a Holocaust survivor, changed the notion of this 26.2 mile race, which this year will be held on Sunday, Nov. 5, from a grueling, sweaty showcase for elite runners into a people's competition.