יום שישי, ד׳ תמוז תשפ״וFriday, June 19, 2026
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By Ron Kampeas
Clinton derided perceptions that U.S.-Israel tensions had become tense under Obama.
By Ron Kampeas
"We have made impressive progress on issues that originally seemed intractable. We have cleared up misunderstandings and held exhaustive discussions on every element of a possible text.”
By Ron Kampeas
It’s not yet clear if Nemmouche was acting on orders and, if so, whether the orders came from ISIS.
By Ron Kampeas
“The Jewish community is going to have to work harder,” said one veteran official who has worked both as a professional in the Jewish community and a staffer for a Jewish lawmaker.
By Ron Kampeas
The disagreements don't seem to have gone away, despite a cease-fire that appears to be firmly in place.
By Ron Kampeas
“On the Hill and with some people with whom I have spoken who are robust Israel supporters, people are concerned if not angry,” one of the staffers, a Democrat, told JTA
By Ron Kampeas
President Obama in an April 25 press conference seemed ready to take a break. “There may come a point at which there just needs to be a pause and both sides need to look at the alternatives,” he said.
By Ron Kampeas
Obama himself suggested that a break from the process may be necessary.
By Ron Kampeas
But Israel's stance is not sufficiently consequential to set off a fight between friends, neoconservative scholars said.
By Ron Kampeas
Tensions between Russia and the West are mounting over the Russian military takeover of the Crimean Peninsula, with the United States and European countries threatening to impose sanctions.
By Ron Kampeas
Expansive outreach, of course, is nothing new for AIPAC. But in the wake of battles over Iran sanctions legislation that pitted the pro-Israel lobbying powerhouse against the White House, many congressional Democrats and liberals more generally, AIPAC’s traditional emphasis on Israel as a bipartisan issue has taken on added urgency.
By Ron Kampeas
Administration officials and Jewish groups sympathetic to Kerry’s initiative say there is a longer-term agenda in preempting attacks on the framework peace agreement the Obama administration is expected to propose soon.
By Ron Kampeas
“As we have since the beginning of the process, we continue to support Secretary Kerry’s diplomatic efforts to achieve a secure and lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman said in a statement to JTA.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Until recently, the rule of thumb in the pro-Israel community was that the bigger the academic group, the less likely it was to consider a boycott of Israeli colleagues.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Amid simmering tensions over Iran policy, the Obama and Netanyahu governments appear to have quietly forged common ground in recent weeks on Israeli-Palestinian talks, with the United States accepting that a possible “framework” agreement might not address every outstanding issue in the negotiations.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping the enemy of one’s enemy truly does become a friend.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Is the U.S. government shutdown, which was still in effect as we went to press Tuesday evening, undermining the sanctions that helped bring Iran to Geneva this week for talks aimed at ending the standoff over its nuclear program?
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a blunt speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, warned that Israel was ready to go it alone against Iran should it come close to obtaining a nuclear weapon.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Pro-Israel officials rolled their eyes this week in response to the opposing spins about their support for President Obama’s drive to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad for his purported use of chemical weapons against his own people.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling his American friends that the purported moderation of Iran’s new president is a ploy aimed at relieving international pressure and buying the Islamic Republic more time to cross the nuclear threshold.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Israeli settler leader Dani Dayan has made it his mission over the years to warn members of Congress, particularly Republicans, of the dangers to Israel should it negotiate with Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Michael Oren was deep inside the State Department, relaxed and taking on all comers: He had the facts on his side. It was 2004 and the department was reviewing newly declassified National Security Agency evidence reinforcing Israel’s longstanding claim that its 1967 air attack on the USS Liberty spy ship was a mistake. The attack killed 34 American personnel.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Ron Dermer laced his address to the 2009 American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference with “I was with him when.”
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – When it comes to foreign assistance, American law couldn’t be clearer: A coup d’etat suspends funding, period.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Former national security adviser, former nuclear negotiator, a decades-old friendship with the supreme leader – Hassan Rohani is as Iranian establishment as it gets.
By Ron Kampeas
Washington – New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg whose signature law facilitated a flood of Soviet Jewish emigration just prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, died Monday morning of viral pneumonia after serving for more than thirty years in Washington.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Poland is a stalwart American ally in Europe, a bulwark against an increasingly belligerent Russia and, with the recent opening of a major new Warsaw museum, is enjoying a flush of accolades for its belated embrace of its Jewish roots.
By Ron Kampeas
The U.S. State Department in its latest human rights report elevated its criticism of Israel’s treatment of African refugees. The report for 2012, issued April 19, said “the treatment of refugees, asylum seekers, and irregular migrants” was a “most significant” human rights problem. That was added to the three areas singled out by the department […]
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – History will remember former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher for relentlessly facing down communism and helping to turn back more than three decades of socialist advance in her country.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- History will remember former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for relentlessly facing down communism and helping to turn back more than three decades of socialist advance in her country. But it was Thatcher's embrace of British Jews and insistent promotion of Jews in her Conservative Party that inspired an outpouring of tributes […]
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Next week’s annual AIPAC policy conference in Washington may be as notable for what – and who – is missing as what’s planned.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – How essential is a house of worship to a neighborhood? That’s the crux of a question now exercising Congress as a bill advances that would provide direct relief to synagogues and churches damaged by Superstorm Sandy last October.
By Ron Kampeas
Koch never met a solicitation for an opinion that he didn't like.
By Ron Kampeas
Gina Campbell, the cathedral’s director of worship, “encouraged all the religious leaders to be faithful to their own traditions.”
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Two major U.S. Jewish groups are at odds over the prospect of penalties for the Palestinians in the wake of their enhanced UN status.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – On a wintry day at a small Iowa shul in November of 2003, John Kerry got all verklempt.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – When the new Congress convenes in January, it will be missing several longtime pillars of support for Israel on Capitol Hill.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is widely seen as a leading candidate to replace Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, has garnered plaudits from Jewish communal leaders for her work at the world body.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – The Republican Party as a whole is reconsidering how it might have done better in an election that saw the party fail to win the White House and suffer modest losses in Congress, and Jewish Republicans and conservatives are coming forward with their own insights.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – During his 30 years in the clubby confines of the U.S. Senate, Arlen Specter never lost his acerbic prosecutorial zeal, friends and associates say.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made headlines last month with this question: What are the U.S. red lines when it comes to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program?
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Mitt Romney’s less than optimistic take on Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects drew some media attention but not much noise from centrist Jewish groups.
By Ron Kampeas
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Jewish swing voters could make or break President Obama’s bid for reelection. At least that’s the case that Democratic Party leaders made in a training session that packed one of the larger halls at the convention center here on Monday, the day before the formal start of the Democratic National Convention.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – The same key words and themes will bounce around Jewish events at next week’s Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., and at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C., the week after that: “pro-Israel,” “marriage,” “Jewish vote” and “abortion.”
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Anointing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney attached a name and face to his fiscal policy.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Call it the Adelson conundrum: What happens when the guy who acts as if he owns the room really does?
By Ron Kampeas
Mitt Romney’s planned trip to Britain, Poland and Israel beginning at the end of this week has shifted the presidential campaign debate for now from jobs, the economy and the candidates’ past to how they would deal with an increasingly fluid world.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Mitt Romney’s announced trip to Israel, at the height of his campaign to wrest the presidency from Barack Obama, could be a twofer, drawing closer two critical constituencies: evangelicals and foreign policy hawks.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – When Yitzhak Shamir was Israel’s prime minister, he liked to point American visitors to a gift he received upon his retirement after many years serving in the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi is the declared winner of Egypt’s presidential race and his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, continues to lie near death in a coma – just like the legacy he tried to craft for himself and his country.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – President Obama is spreading the word, one Jewish constituency at a time: He has Israel’s back. Obama defended his record on Israel and on religious freedoms last week during a White House meeting with Orthodox leaders convened by the Orthodox Union.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Mitt Romney’s Lacrosse moment awaits him. The Democratic convention in Los Angeles was where Joe Lieberman made history as the first Jewish candidate on a major ticket on Aug. 17, 2000. But two days later, history came to life in Lacrosse, Wis., the little college town where Lieberman walked – and pointedly did not drive – to the local synagogue on his first post-nomination Shabbat.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – President Obama enjoys the support of three-fifths of American Jews, according to the latest American Jewish Committee survey, a significant improvement over where he stood half a year ago in the organization’s polling.WASHINGTON – President Obama enjoys the support of three-fifths of American Jews, according to the latest American Jewish Committee survey, a significant improvement over where he stood half a year ago in the organization’s polling.
By Ron Kampeas
The Republican primaries are effectively over, and gone with them is the sharp-edged rhetoric and departures from past U.S. policy on the Middle East.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may not have bridged their differences on how to deal with Iran, but each managed to give the other a measure of reassurance.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – For the Jews of Cuba, it was the ultimate Internet connection. The high-tech equipment that U.S. contractor Alan Gross brought with him to Cuba in 2009 to help connect local Jews to the Internet reportedly included a SIM card that makes it almost impossible to track satellite signals and is generally unavailable to civilians, even in the United States.
By Ron Kampeas
"The Department of State intends to work with Congress to seek legislation that would provide authority to waive restrictions on paying the U.S. assessed contributions to UNESCO," says a footnote in the budget that the White House submitted to Congress this month.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Israeli leaders blamed Iran for two assassination attempts late Sunday and early Monday – in Tbilisi, Georgia, and in New Delhi, India. The bomb in Tbilisi was disabled before it could be activated, and the attack in India wounded the wife of an Israeli diplomat and her driver.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – When America’s top intelligence official said that Iran’s regime is considering attacks on U.S. soil, he cited a single incident and qualified the assessment with a “probably.”
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Israel, the United States and Iran have all gone deep into mixed-signals territory.
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – Barack Obama won’t show up on the vote tallies after polls close in Florida’s Republican primary on Jan. 31, but the president’s supporters already are waging a fight for the Sunshine State.
By Ron Kampeas
The AJC said the “unfettered right of religious institutions to decide who shall convey their religious messages is as much an element of church-state separation as the ban on government sponsorship of religious messages.”
By Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON – President Obama on Monday announced that Jack Lew, his director of the Office of Budget and Management – a Cabinet-level position – would replace William Daley as White House chief of staff.
By Ron Kampeas
Experts are divided as to the seriousness of the threat to cut off the strait and whether it will lead to war. A direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran may be inevitable, and that the two countries are headed down that road in “slow motion.”
