• Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon argued that, whether or not the East Jerusalem announcement’s timing was unfortunate, Israeli development there is legitimate: “Jerusalem has always been out of the question.” Ladies and gentlemen, your second-ranking Israeli diplomat! [Haaretz]
• One day after endorsing the Goldstone Report, the E.U. parliament demanded that Hamas immediately release Gilad ...

Liel Leibovitz’s dispatch from Antigua—where he arrived visa-less, and was soon suspected of being Mossad—has provoked a number of comments on the site. Not all of them friendly! And some of the vitriol over a relatively light-hearted article prompted “Victoria” to wonder the following:
I am a very recent (like a week ago) convert to ...

Raise your hand if you’ve heard the old saw—sometimes attributed to Abba Eban—that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity? (I’ll raise my hand. I once heard it from Danny Ayalon, then Israel’s ambassador to the United States, from the bimah at my Washington, D.C., synagogue during Yom Kippur.) In the wake ...

The papers that show Albert Einstein’s development of the General Theory of Relativity are not on display in Germany, where he was born, or in the United States, where he lived the last part of his life, but in Israel. As part of its 50th anniversary celebration, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities is ...

Um, don’t really know what else to do with this, so am just going to quote liberally from the Daily Mail article (h/t: Ynet):
A group of stunned primary schoolchildren began crying when their teacher told them during a bizarre Holocaust game that they were to be taken away from their families.
The pupils, aged 11, became ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Michelle Goldberg traces how a French Sephardic woman named Mirra Alfassa became the “de facto goddess” of the southern Indian town of Pondicherry. Ian Volner considers the Beth Sholom synagogue in Philadelphia’s suburbs, for which, 50 years ago, Frank Lloyd Wright sought to design “a properly Jewish-American architecture, in a postwar ...

Where does Israel’s announcement of 1,600 new Israeli homes in East Jerusalem leave the United States? Where does it leave American Jews? America put immense pressure on both sides to agree to “proximity talks”—which center around its envoy, George Mitchell—even though neither side’s preconditions had been met; and soon after the U.S. vice president arrives ...

• Vice President Joe Biden gave his big speech in Israel, after tweaking it in response to the East Jerusalem construction announcement. The speech was mostly warm, with Biden explaining, “Only a friend can deliver the hardest truth.” [JPost]
• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pledged to stick to the proximity talks, even after the construction announcement. ...

• The Arab League called an emergency meeting to reconsider its backing of “proximity talks” in light of the East Jerusalem construction announcement. [Ynet]
• There’s a massive battle of the Israeli media titans right now, involving, among others, Sheldon Adelson. [LAT]
• 1980s teenage star Corey Haim, who was born to a Toronto Jewish family, died ...

A post from yesterday on the Reform Movement’s decision to move from discouraging intermarriage to encouraging the intermarried to cultivate Jewish homes—as commenter Carl Rosen put it on Facebook, the movement is “accepting the intermarried more than intermarriage”—drew a whole bunch of responses, both on Facebook and, especially, on The Scroll itself.
Those who applauded ...