n the weeks immediately following the 1967 Six-Day War, I was part of a contingent of international civilian volunteers—mostly Jews—sent from Jerusalem to El Arish, in northern Sinai. It was a mission that marked my life indelibly, and left me with a debt it has taken more than half a century to repay.
The legacy of this half-forgotten conflict is an important one for those who care about religious freedom and religious pluralism today.
I arrived in Jerusalem as a reporter five days before the war. When I asked directions in English of a woman on the street near the King David Hotel, she looked at me sharply and said, “Haven’t you gone home yet?” When I said I had just arrived, she nodded and pointed out my destination. The King David itself, I would learn, had gone overnight from 86 percent occupancy to one percent.
I sat in front of our black-and-white 19-inch TV watching the progress of the war, my heart in my mouth the whole time.
The candidness and emotional vulnerability of Israeli soldiers is of such renown today that there’s even a pejorative for it: yorim ve’bochim, shooting and crying.
We want to hear your stories.
Into the hell of Bosnia entered Susan Sontag. It was July 1993, her second visit, and she was in Sarajevo to direct a production of Waiting for Godot.
On the anniversary of the United States’ entrance into the war, here are some of the books marking the beginnings, the events of the Great War itself and some books on special areas of interest.
April 6, 1917 is the official date for America’s entry into World War I, and over the next 19 months, some 250,000 Jews served in the American armed forces. Through this timeline, explore some of their stories.
Rabbi Yigal Levenstein’s crude, misogynist, hate-filled statements about religious women serving in the Israel Defense Forces, leave little doubt as to what he thinks about women in the army and about Israeli society in general.
