From attacks on our site to talking points for rabbis: thoughts for the Jewish New Year. So it's that time of year again, when Gerald Steinberg writes an article about us. Steinberg, the head of a right-wing organization called NGO Monitor, has been using +972 (along with a few of other organizations) as tools in his efforts to demonize the New Israel Fund (following its decsion to add us to their donor-advised list). This is what he has to say: A number of +972’s bloggers have invoked the immoral and false “apartheid” analogy, and in a February 2012 interview in…

The New York Times published a laudable, bold editorial this weekend that highlights a number of creeping threats to Israeli democracy. The article is vital for reaching audiences who really care about Israel's future. After three years of onslaught on Israel's democratic foundations (which were already deeply flawed), the situation is now urgent. Every day, truly scary signs of under-the-radar McCarthyism can be seen – just this morning Haaretz reported on the attempt to oust an official (Hebrew) in the Education Ministry responsible for civics education, who has come under a right-wing witch-hunt, despite protests by both left- and right-leaning colleagues. The legitimization…

Likud MK Ophir Akunis defends his aggressive anti-democratic legislation in Channel 10 interview: "Joe McCarthy was right about everything" It's amazing how just a few words of criticism from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who voiced fear for Israel's democracy and women's rights yesterday, can really make some people show their true face, as you'll see below. Likud MK Ophir Akunis was interviewed today on Channel 10's "London and Kirshenbaum." If it were up to Akunis, who helped propose the law to limit funding for NGOs and is a very close ally of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, an Israeli McCarthy…

The following is a post I wrote originally for the Project Democracy blog - an ACRI initiative that aims to raise awareness of the threats posed by the current government and society to Israel's democratic culture. Back in 1941, shortly after the United States entered World War Two, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously articulated the Four Freedoms in his State of the Union address, as a means of describing the essential democratic values for which Americans were being asked to fight. Roosevelt's freedoms are: 1) Freedom of speech and expression 2) Freedom of worship 3) Freedom from want 4) Freedom…