ARZA

By Resa and Stanley Davids According to Wikipedia, Nate Silver is a statistician, sabermetrician, psephologist and writer.  Two words in the previous sentence were rejected by our Google spell-check; truth be told, we needed to track the meaning of those same two words in an online dictionary.  Silver became famous in the United States in [...]

By Sandy Tankoos The Israeli electorate has spoken and what they have said is a little different than what had been predicted.  Although Israel is a democracy, their system is quite different than ours here in the U.S.  In the United States we vote for a person who usually runs with the support of a [...]

Today is Election Day in Israel, and members of the Kibbutz Lotan community are taking part in the process. While adults vote in the national elections, the kids are learning how the system works by running mock elections in their groups. Community members are also voting for new leadership of the kibbutz. It’s a very [...]

By Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie This article was originally published on Haaretz.com. “In your post-election Knesset speech, address directly the Reform and Conservative majority of American Jews – the heart of our Jewish family and the core of Jewish support for Israel – and who are finished being understanding and patient while Israel’s official representatives [...]

The World Zionist Organization (WZO) has developed an exciting new interactive game that puts a fun spin on Israeli politics. ARZA will be officially launching the game at a cocktail reception next month in New York City. Our staff has previewed the game and we’re very excited to introduce it to the greater Jewish community.

From a letter home: I’m back in Tel Aviv, on a break in between classes. I spent the weekend up north with our family friends to escape the potential threat of rockets in Tel Aviv. I thought I would find some quiet there, but Timrat is located near an air force base so you could [...]

Shabbat Shalom to all, This evening the bombing found me in Tel Aviv in Beit Daniel. As I was carrying on with my work and talking to people in the office, we heard a siren. You could see on everyone’s faces that no one knew if to take is seriously or not. After a few [...]

There is an old Chinese saying: women hold up half the sky. It would seem that, in this world view, women and their contributions to life are of equal importance to those of men. This does not really speak to the nature of those contributions, if they are the same or different efforts, but that [...]

This letter was written by an ARZA member in response to the arrest of Anat Hoffman on Tuesday. It was sent to a member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Amid all of the wonderful things for which we celebrate Israel, the appalling, and disgraceful treatment of Jewish women in Jerusalem and elsewhere is a [...]

By Rabbi Edgar Nof In Israel, we retell the legend of a meeting between Napoleon and the Jews.  When Napoleon asked the Jews why they commemorate Passover, the Jews answered that they annually celebrate their exodus from slavery to freedom in Egypt 3000 years ago.  Napoleon replied that a people who can remember how they [...]