More in ‘AIPAC’

It’s not surprising to find hawkish Bush administration Mideast expert Elliott Abrams, whom Tablet Magazine’s Lee Smith profiled last month, advocating an air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But, at a seminar in Baltimore a few days ago, he argued in favor of a crucial nuance: That it would actually be better if America, and ...

It’s a bright and warm spring Washington afternoon, a climate perfectly suited to a gathering of one of Washington’s most cheerfully sunny organizations, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. With U.S.-Israel relations at an all-time low, and both Washington and Jerusalem facing serious foreign threats, the institute’s 25th-anniversary meeting at the Renaissance Hotel is ...

• President Obama appeared to echo Gen. Petraeus’s view that the Mideast conflict “ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.” [NYT]
• Backed by U.S. officials, President Shimon Peres accused Syria of giving Scud missiles to Hezbollah (Syria denies it). These weapons could easily reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem from ...

“Christoph Waltz played a Nazi obsessed with finding Jews,” Steve Martin said at the Academy Awards this year, referring to the Austrian actor’s Oscar-winning turn in Inglourious Basterds. Martin then gestured ostentatiously to the theater filled with Hollywood’s glitterati and added, “The mother lode.” Martin’s joke brought down the house, largely because of the ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Mideast columnist Lee Smith catches up with Steve Rosen, the ousted AIPAC policy director who was the victim; while Rosen was accused of leaking sensitive U.S. information to the Israeli Embassy, Smith argues he was the victim of “the criminalization of policy disputes.” Book critic Adam Kirsch reviews the latest biographer ...

“I wish they’d leave Bibi alone,” said my cab driver, an African-American born-again Christian in his mid-fifties. He was upset about the recent turn in U.S.-Israel relations over the last two weeks and complained all the way to Union Station. “What do they mean Jews can’t build in Jerusalem?” he asked. He grabbed his ...

• The United States has proposed less severe U.N. sanctions to try to get Russia and China onboard. [WSJ/Kurdish Globe]
• Meanwhile, an AIPAC-backed letter calling for harsh and unilateral Iran sanctions has been like a magnet for congressional signatures. [Ben Smith]
• The U.S. and Israeli administrations are constructing “the blueprint”: a list of everything that ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, famed chef Daniel Boulud looks to another holiday when devising a Passover recipe for us: the fried potato pancake, after all, is pesadik. Esther Schor, author of Nextbook Press’s Emma Lazarus, discusses how to invite the famous Jewish poet of liberation to Seder. Reporting from the AIPAC Conference in Washington, D.C., ...

If no one was sure what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to tell the 7,500 delegates who descended on Washington for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference early this week, everyone knew what Elliott Abrams was going to say. For more than a year, the ...

Why does AIPAC hold its annual policy conference in Washington, D.C.? It’s not just to make it easy for politicians to show up for its plenary sessions and gala dinners! This morning, a few thousand delegates, who have spent the two days focusing on various threats to the Jewish state—Iran, the Goldstone Report, daylight between ...