The University of Lodz, Poland, intends to award Israeli writer Amos Oz with an honorary doctorate. The ceremony will be held on March 20 at the university. Oz will also give a lecture there that day. The Israeli author is being honored not only for his literature, but also for his contributions to Jewish culture, according to the university. Oz is one of Israel's most widely read and best-known writers. He has won many awards, including the Israel Prize, and his books have been translated into dozens of …More

Brent Sasley teaches Israeli and Middle East politics at the University of Texas at Arlington, and blogs at Mideast Matrix. He can be reached on Twitter on twitter.com/besasley. It’s often said these days that the left in Israel not only is decimated, but it continues to cling to long outdated idealism about how to solve the conflict with the Palestinians and withdraw from the West Bank. Also that it’s out of touch with Israelis’ current preoccupations and the settlers’ successes. Avraham …More

Peter Beinart’s newest book "The Crisis of Zionism" has generated some controversy in the American-Zionist community, earning both praise and criticism for its bold stance and provocative positions. The book is a personal reflection on what it means for the senior Daily Beast editor and CUNY professor to be a Zionist, the current state and future possibilities of democracy in Israel, and his belief that current mainstream American Jewish leadership does not value Zionism’s original liberal …More

J Street’s third annual conference began Saturday night under the banner of “Making History.” The Washington DC gathering, expected to attract over 2,500 people, runs through March 27. Lobby founder Jeremy Ben-Ami spoke about the reasons J Street was founded in 2008. “We are dissatisfied with the status-quo. The status quo is simply not sustainable,” Ben-Ami said. “Give the land for the Palestinian state, or keep the land and sacrifice the democratic and Jewish nature of …More

Israeli artists and academics have called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent the deportation of refugees who came from South Sudan. The 400 writers, authors and musicians sent a petition to the prime minister Tuesday asking him to stop the deportation, saying it would expose the refugees, many of them children, " to a raging war, hunger and disease." Some 700 South Sudanese refugees must leave Israel by the end of the month or be deported, according to the Interior Ministry, which said that since …More

Israeli author Amos Oz has discovered - to his delight - a bootleg Kurdish translation of his wildly popular book, "A Tale of Love and Darkness." "The Arabic publisher of 'A Tale of Love and Darkness,' who published it just over a year ago in Beirut, was on a trip in northern Iraq and found the book in a bookstore," Oz told Haaretz yesterday. "He bought a copy and sent it to my agent in London, who sent it to me." "A Tale of Love and Darkness," originally published by Keter in 2002, has sold more than a million …More

Israel has never been an egalitarian state. But in its heyday, it was more egalitarian than most states in the world. The poverty wasn't acute and the wealth wasn't ostentatious, and social responsibility toward the poor and needy was shown not only on the economic level but on the emotional level too. In the earlier Israel, those who worked — and almost all the women and men worked very hard — could make a modest but respectable living for themselves and their families. The new immigrants, the …More

At the age of 72, Amos Oz is nine years older than the state of Israel. The fact that he and his country grew up together was memorably expressed in the 2004 memoir, "A Tale of Love and Darkness", in which the development of the nation was viewed though the expanding consciousness of a young boy with a declared ambition "to grow up to become a book." It was a landmark publication, yet since the memoir's appearance Oz has moved on to explore alternative terrain. Rhyming Life and Death was a short, sardonic …More

Israel has never been an egalitarian state. But in its heyday, it was more egalitarian than most states in the world. The poverty wasn't acute and the wealth wasn't ostentatious, and social responsibility toward the poor and needy was shown not only on the economic level but on the emotional level too. In the earlier Israel, those who worked - and almost all the women and men worked very hard - could make a modest but respectable living for themselves and their families. The new immigrants, the refugees, the …More

Author Amos Oz spoke Tuesday at the Presidential Conference in Jerusalem and criticized the peace process with the Palestinians. Oz said he believes the "ongoing occupation" of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the construction in settlements is in general immoral, as well as bad for Israel's interests. The author, who received intermittent applause as well as a good deal of booing, added that the "expulsion of Palestinians" from their homes in Jerusalem and their "replacement" with settlers is also …More