Contributor Archives: Leonard Fein, Board Member

About Leonard Fein, Board Member

Leonard Fein is a writer and teacher. His most recent book is "Against the Dying of the Light: A Father’s Story of Love, Loss, and Hope". In 1974, he founded Moment magazine, which became America's leading independent magazine of Jewish affairs, and which he served as editor and publisher for 13 years. In 1985, he founded Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, which is the American Jewish community's principal vehicle for participation in the campaign against world hunger. And in 1996, he founded the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy, a project for mobilizing the American Jewish community to provide volunteer reading tutors for 2nd and 3rd graders, principally in inner-city schools. The NJCL now has tutoring programs in 29 American cities, where a total of some 12,000 volunteers work with some 20,000 children.

Israel’s Birth Certificate

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Leonard Fein, Board Member
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Considerable attention has, these last several weeks, been focused on the report of Israel’s Levy Commission.  No great surprise: The three-person commission, appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu to render an advisory opinion regarding Jewish settlement in the West Bank, determined that there is no barrier to such settlement and, indeed, that the legality of all such settlements that may have been thought clouded could and should be retroactively affirmed. Essentially, the Commission …

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‘There Is No Alternative’ Is No Answer

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Leonard Fein, Board Member

  In August of 1973 I arrived in Israel as a guest of the Foreign Ministry. For reasons I no longer recall, the Ministry had decided that my conversion to its view of Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinians was a worthy investment. This was six years after Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War, hence of its conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza District; it was six weeks before the Yom Kippur War, which Israel won only after suffering significant losses (2656 dead, 7250 …

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An Experiment That, for a Time, Did Not Fail

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Leonard Fein, Board Member

By Leonard Fein “Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end…” That song may be much on the lips (or, more likely, in the hearts) of veterans of Israel’s now nearly comatose kibbutz movement. It may seem a bit odd to be talking about the kibbutz movement, home to less than 2% of Israel’s people, at a time when huge arguments regarding the future of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem, some six% of the total Israeli population) rage …

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