August 31, 2008

Broadcast Date: 
Aug 31 2008

Activists arrive into a Gaza port, breaking a year-long closure; the Committee to Protect Journalists warns of attacks on journalists in the Occupied Territories; plus a new Brandeis study finds that men are fleeing Jewish religious life.

Episode segments
  • Activists break Gaza closure
    Topic: Israel/Palestine | Occupation
    Guests: Jeff Halper is coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and was on board the Free Gaza, a boat owned by the Free Gaza Movement that landed in a Gaza Port on August 23, breaking the Israeli blockade.
    Hosts: Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Gaza has been under lockdown since Hamas took control over the territory in June 2007, but a group of activists broke the closure on August 23 of this year, arriving into a Gaza harbor on two boats, the Liberty and the Free Gaza.

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  • Journalists in the Occupied Territories under attack
    Topic: Israel/Palestine | Occupation
    Guests: Joel Campagna is Middle East coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
    Hosts: Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    Earlier this month, the Israeli Defense Forces issued a report exonerating its own soldiers in the killing of Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana; more recently, the IDF detained a Palestinian soundman for the Ramattan news agency, raided and shut down two radio stations and a television station in the West Bank, and jailed the father of a Palestinian teenager working with the human rights group B'Tselem after she caught on camera an IDF soldier shooting a handcuffed Palestinian youth.

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  • Does Judaism have a 'boy crisis'?
    Topic: Religion | Feminism | Jewish Life
    Guests: Sylvia Barack Fishman is a professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University's Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department and is the co-author of the study "Matrilineal Ascent/Patrilineal Descent: The Gender Imbalance in American Jewish Life.”
    Hosts: Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    A Brandeis study finds evidence that Jewish men are dropping out of religious life in the Reform and Conservative movements and that women now predominate among rabbinic students, cantorial students, bar/bat mitvahs, and at Jewish schools and Jewish summer camps. Is this a "disturbing" trend, as the study's authors assert, or a victory for feminism?

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