News that Natalie Portman's production company acquired the film rights to Amos Oz's autobiographical A Tale of Love and Darkness for her directorial debut was initially met with much excitement. But now that filming has begun in an ultra-Orthodox-populated section in Jerusalem, it looks like the locals are causing…

American conservatives love, love, love Israel. They also hate, hate, hate abortion and socialized medicine. American conservatives face one hell of a moral conundrum in the new year.

Considering the New York Times' general hesitancy to publish anything remotely scandalous (curse words, nudity), it made sense that people were surprised they chose to display a woman with a tattoo of the Star of David, a lumpectomy scar and a smidge of her areola. But now the photographer and photo editors involved…

It's an exciting week for 23 year-old Isra al-Mudallal, former correspondent for Iran's English-language Press TV Channel. She just started her new job as the first English-language and woman (they're going all out) spokesperson for the Hamas, the face of a new wave in the organization as it gears up to more…

Alice Walker, the author, poet and activist most famous for her 1983 novel The Color Purple, was uninvited from the University of Michigan's 50th Anniversary for the Center for Education of Women because she's so anti-Israel that she compares the country to Nazi Germany.

I guess the snake never carpooled to high school with a slightly older snake who informed it knowingly, over the chorus of Sublime's "What I Got," to "act like you're totally into it and NEVER use your teeth. Oh and this is sooo awkward but you owe me gas money."

Israel's army is a subject of fascination to many Americans, primarily because they draft not only male civilians, but women as well. There's a group of Israelis though who, until recently, were actually exempt from conscription: ultra-Orthodox men and women. And it's their lack of inclusion in the draft, similar to…

Indiscreet Facebook posting usually leads to trouble, especially if, let’s say, you’re part of a fairly conservative institution that doesn’t value individual expression quite as much as unstinting obedience and homogeneity. If you were serving in the Israeli military, for instance, you might not want to post…

Some people get their rocks off obsessing about the Royal Wedding, which definitely ranks as one of the most elaborate (and popular) celebrations of Christianity still remaining. For those of the Jewish faith who felt left out of that display, here's equally insane alternative: the wedding of Rabbi Shalom Rokeach,…

A United States official confirmed that Israel launched an airstrike against Syria on Thursday night, escalating an already volatile situation while the United States decides whether to carry out its own strikes against the Assad regime.

An Israeli court ruled today that women can legally pray and wear prayer shawls at Jerusalem's Western Wall, despite the best efforts of Orthodox Jews who want the holy site to remain a boy's club until the Red Sea parts once more, and probably even after that.

Critics of the Women of the Wall—female Jewish advocates of the equal right to prayer at the Western Wall by reading aloud from the Torah and wearing the religious garments of tallitot and tefillin (considered traditional for men only)—assume that it's comprised entirely of female Reform Jews. However, some feminist…

Five women who were recently detained at the Western Wall in Jerusalem for daring to pray alongside men at Israel's holiest site will not be penalized for "disturbing public order" by virtue of their gender. Progress!

Print media may be dying in many places, but not in Israel. This week, the new Hebrew edition of Playboy hit the newsstands of the Holy Land; as the Times of Israel reported, the magazine's famous articles will now be read right to left for the first time.

People try to sneak lots of miscellaneous contraband into prison, but how often do they try to sneak things that aren't people out of prison? Almost never, probably because the whole point of prison is that it doesn't have anything that anyone wants, except, in the case of Israeli prisons holding Palestinian…

Here's the gist of the controversy over Israel's holy Western Wall: lots of Jewish women think they deserve the right to pray aloud, read from the Torah, and wear religious garments there, just as men do, but the ultra-Orthodox caretakers of the site have made sure they're prohibited by law from doing just that.…

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has assigned famous former dissident Natan Sharansky an impossible task that The Daily Beast's Dan Ephron calls "almost cruel in its complexity." No, it's not brokering peace in the Middle East, but coming up with some sort of compromise between Jewish women who want to pray at…