Britannia Radio

Daily Briefing

Monday, January 24, 2011

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Featured Story The vote in South Sudan for 'the Jews of our time' From the start, the author viewed the South Sudanese as the Jews of our time: targeted for mass murder and slavery by the government in Khartoum while the so-called civilized world sat on its hands. Read more » Editors' Picks Loving Lviv JTA columnist Ruth Ellen Gruber sits on the jury of a design competition to help the western Ukraine city of Lviv rediscover its Jewish past, before it was annihilated in the Holocaust. Good-bye Jewish mother stereotype One virtue of the "Tiger Mother" controversy is that after half a century, the Jewish mother may at last be supplanted in the national consciousness as the key ethnic neurosis-generation machine, commentator John Podhoretz writes in the New York Post. Transformation of Natalie Portman Israeli-born actress Natalie Portman discusses her film career, her life and her performance in "Black Swan" in an in-depth CBS interview. A mother's rights Abbie Dorn, a Jewish woman in a wheelchair and unable to speak due to poor medical care following the birth of her triplets, has been fighting with her ex-husband for visitation rights since their birth more than three years ago, The Los Angeles Times reports. Blood libel's real meaning In applying the phrase "blood libel" loosely, we discount and trivialize the long history of the blood libel as a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda, writes author Ronald Florence in the Forward. Britain's humiliation in Palestine Peter Kosminsky, one of Britain's most acclaimed directors, has spent 11 years creating a moving television drama that tells the story of postwar Palestine and Israeli independence through the eyes of a British soldier serving in the territory. The Guardian reports on the making of the film. The Eulogizer: John Gross, Arnold Gardner JTA's Appreciation column remembers a British literary critic and a politically active lawyer. Breaking News Palestinian peace negotiators were willing to turn over nearly all of the Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem and accept a shared authority of the Temple Mount, leaked Palestinian documents reveal. The Jewish Federations of North America is launching a $5.5 million fundraising campaign for Ethiopian immigration to Israel. A bombing at the busiest airport in Moscow that killed at least 31 and injured 130 is being called a terrorist attack by Russian officials. A federal lawsuit has been filed against King County, Wash., for its decision to reject advertisements about "Israeli war crimes" on downtown Seattle buses. A project to save Holocaust-era mass graves from oblivion in Eastern Europe has received about $400,000 from the German Foreign Ministry. The Israeli commission of inquiry into the Israeli Navy's interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla found that the naval blockade of Gaza does not break international law. A strike by Israeli Foreign Ministry employees that caused the cancellation of visits by foreign delegations has ended. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the Holocaust "the darkest chapter in history" at a synagogue service remembering the victims. Talks on Iran's nuclear program between the Islamic Republic and six world powers have been deemed a failure. Israeli soldiers reportedly shot and wounded two Palestinians after they broke through a military checkpoint near Hebron. Thirteen Jewish teenagers will visit Israel on a trip that is believed to be the first-ever tour of the country designed for disabled and chronically ill teens. Yad Vashem has launched a YouTube channel in Farsi and an expanded version of its Farsi website. The late French author Louis-Ferdinand Celine was cut from a list of personalities to be remembered at an annual ceremony because of his anti-Semitic past. The Talmud will be translated for the first time into Italian. Shahar Peer, Israel's top-ranked women's tennis player, bowed out of the Australian Open in the third round. Tullia Zevi, a longtime Jewish leader and one of the most prominent women in postwar Italy, died in Rome.