Photo: Israel resident Mylan Tanzer gets his third COVID vaccine. By Mylan Tanzer Tonight I got my third COVID jab. Israel now has a government that I trust, and I have always trusted our health authorities. So on Thursday, when the government announced that due to the waning effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine in…
Immediately following the Six-Day War I doubt anyone thought the West Bank, seized in the fighting with Jordan, which occupied it at the time, would still be largely held by Israel nearly 50 years later. (I am not referring to people whose religious beliefs regard the conquering of Judea and Samaria, the historical birthplace of…
After a stormy session in February the Knesset passed in its first reading, by a 50-43 majority, the controversial “Law for the Transparency of NGOs.” It still must be brought to two additional votes, but it appears to be on the fast track to being enacted into law. Referred to in the media as the…
In the aftermath of the San Bernardino and Paris terror attacks, perhaps the world will begin to understand that Israelis cope with a local version of this same wave of terror. Americans fear additional acts of Islamic “lone-wolf” terror on American soil. And Europe begins to fathom that the threat of ISIS is not limited…
One day after his 76th birthday, the dean of Israeli satire, Moti Kirshenbaum, died suddenly of a heart attack. This column is dedicated to him – not only for his groundbreaking role in introducing political satire into Israeli society and creating Israeli television, but for his long, exceptional and diverse career that became, as one…
The week before Rosh Hashanah, a sandstorm originating in the Syrian desert covered Israel in a thick layer of dust and sand. From Metulla to the Negev, the skies were yellow-brown, the sun could not be seen, the heat was unbearable and breathing was difficult. Generally these storms last no more than a day, and…
I have written often in this column about the bittersweet nature of life in Israel. Israelis move swiftly from cheerful to sorrowful and grief-stricken in response to frequent news breaks of terror and death. This reality of daily life is symbolically captured each year when the “Remembrance Day For Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terror”…
There were three big surprises over the last month. Not necessarily in this order, the first was the almost weeklong storm and cold spell in mid-April, only the third such occurrence since records have been kept. Some Shalom Aleichem-inspired web pranksters launched a convincing story claiming the Chief Rabbinate had miscalculated the Jewish calendar, and…
Compulsive military service has created a kind of IDF subculture in civil society. Since most Israelis are IDF veterans, most Hebrew slang naturally has its origins in the IDF. But as the elections approach, the most common military jargon seems to be “yorim b’toch ha’nagmash” (firing your weapon inside the armored personnel carrier), a phrase…
While Israel is naturally concerned by the ever-present dangers that hover over us, the inequitable social burden and the direction of Israeli society have become so omnipresent in our daily life that they pre-occupy Israelis more than the prospect of Iranian weapons grade uranium or Palestinian missiles and terror. Those concerns drove Yair Lapid to…
