By using avatars, Facebook, fake websites, and fake news, new private intelligence firms staffed by Israeli intelligence personnel are waging wars on perception to alter targeted groups’ beliefs and behavior. In their story for The New Yorker, Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow profile one firm called Psy-Group to delve deep into this disturbing frontier, which one Israeli intelligence […]
Israel
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Second Passport
In this personal essay, instead of returning home after a trip to Israel like most Birthright tourists do, Pam Mandel goes on to Egypt, and beyond.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism
A Second Passport
Normally, kibbutz volunteers visit Israel and return home. Pam Mandel went on to Egypt, and kept going . . .
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Story
A Second Passport
Normally, kibbutz volunteers visit Israel and return home. Pam Mandel went on to Egypt, and kept going . . .
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Great Grandfather the Bundist
Writer and artist Molly Crabapple tells the story of her late great grandfather, self-taught artist Sam Rothbort, and of the Bund, the revolutionary anti-Zionist Jewish political party he joined in Vilna in 1898.
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Do You Make a TV Show Set in the West Bank?
What the thriller “Fauda” reveals about what Israelis will watch—and what they won’t.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
For Caregivers from the Philippines, the Israeli Dream Is Fragile
In colloquial Hebrew, the word filipinit — a woman from the Philippines — is no longer a simple demonym; Filipinas have dominated the eldercare sector in Israel for so long that it has become a generic term for “caregiver.” In the New York Times Magazine, Ruth Margalit explores the stories of precariously employed women and […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Israel’s Invisible Filipino Work Force
Tens of thousands of Filipinos — mostly women — keep Israel’s caregiving sector afloat, while navigating homesickness, cultural tensions, and often-exploitative labor practices.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Sarah Helm on ISIS in Gaza
His central point, however, is incontestable. ISIS is taking root in Gaza among its disillusioned youth; he might not be able to persuade his own students “to maintain peaceful methods,” Omar Hams said. “We are dealing with individual souls. Anyone oppressed can do anything. That is why I issue a warning: to end the suffering […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Arabs, Jews, and Israel’s Pork Industry
Surprisingly, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and a staunch secularist, opposed pork consumption. He viewed eating pork as a recent Jewish diasporic cultural development that Israelis needed to shed in order to forge a united Israeli identity. In 1962 the Knesset officially outlawed the breeding and selling of pigs, except for in Arab-Christian areas, […]