New articles by Partners' writers

New articles by Partners’ writers

Our board’s resident expert on Israeli and Zionist history, Jerome A. Chanes, is a contributing editor of The Forward and a senior fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies of the City University of New York Graduate Center.

His latest article in The Forward is a review of Israel: A History by Anita Shapira. He describes her as “a forthright centrist in her historiography, paralleling in many ways the views of Mapai/Labor, the regnant political institution for many decades in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine under the British Mandate and in the State of Israel.”

This blog’s co-administrator, Ralph Seliger, has just posted a piece in The Forward’s Arty Semite blog on his new interview with Guy Davidi, the Israeli co-director of the Academy Award nominated documentary “5 Broken Cameras.” Davidi explains his upset that Israelis and Palestinians have been in contention over whether his film is really Israeli or Palestinian. “Films have no nationalities,” he declares, as he depicts in some detail his role and that of his Palestinian co-director, Emad Burnat, in this “Palestinian-Israeli-French co-production, [with] Israeli and Palestinian directors and a story that is told [with] Palestinian characters and in the West Bank.”

In the past few days, Seliger has also had his analysis of the post-election coalition-building process, “In Israel’s Election, A Star Is Born,” published on the website of In These Times magazine. It focuses on the relative fortunes of the various parties on the Left, Right and Center, with the big question being: “After a surprise showing, will centrist Yair Lapid put his new clout behind peace?”