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Sharon and Abbas declare end to four years of hostilities
Echoing the words of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas moments before, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Tuesday announced an agreement to end more than four years of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians.
"Today, in my meeting with Chairman Abbas, we agreed that all Palestinians will stop all acts of violence against all Israelis everywhere, and, at the same time, Israel will cease all its military activity against all Palestinians everywhere," Sharon said at the close of a day-long summit in the Red Sea resort town.
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The Kremlin attempts to balance American influence in the region by quietly launching its own initiatives with Iran and Syria. Russia had grudging congratulations this week for the election in Iraq, but President Vladimir V. Putin is making it increasingly clear that the Kremlin does not intend to let the U.S. dictate the future landscape of the Middle East.
Labour denied a proposed new election poster campaign was anti-semitic, after it transposed the heads of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin - who are both Jewish - on to pigs. The ad, which is supposed to play on the idea "pigs might fly", bears the caption "The day the tory sums ad up", features both the leader of the opposition and the shadow chancellor as pigs with wings.
It’s common knowledge that Middle East Studies programs at America’s elite universities have become ground zero for violent anti-Israel incitement, featuring professors, courses and conferences that excuse—and in some cases, even support—Palestinian terrorism. It comes as no surprise, then, that Princeton University’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, created in 2003 and originally financed by the royal family of Morocco, is offering a new fellowship based on the righteousness of the Palestinian cause and the illegitimacy of Israel.
The percentage of Greek Jews exterminated by the Nazis was one of the highest in Europe, even though Greece is not the country that first springs to mind in connection with the Holocaust. Their community was virtually wiped out: of the 80,000 Jews who lived in Greece before World War II, only about 1,000 survived.
A rise in the number of Muslims in Western Europe, many of them poor and uneducated, is contributing to an increase in already deeply rooted anti-Semitism there, the State Department said in a report to Congress.
Abraham Rabinovich is a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and a United States Army veteran. He is the author of the new book The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East. 
Since she made her debut at the age of 12 in the 1994 thriller Leon, Natalie Portman has become one of the hottest young stars around, combining roles in blockbusters (the Star Wars series, Cold Mountain) with such cult favorites as Beautiful Girls and Mars Attacks!
If art is a form of self-projection and film qualifies as artistic expression, then a Jewish film festival is a unique opportunity for Jewish self-reflection. And if the lineup at this month's 14th annual New York Jewish Film Festival is any indication, the Jews are still obsessed with the Holocaust.
Watching Woody Allen’s lackluster play, “A Second Hand Memory,” directed by the author at the Atlantic Theatre Company, one wonders if Allen really knows his limitations. For Allen, the pre-eminent filmmaker who seems to have lost touch with who he is several years ago, writing and directing serious drama turns out to be more of a stretch than he can handle. The result is a painful experience of watching a master misapply himself, making the worst of a stellar cast. A play about betrayal becomes itself a kind of double-cross of Allen’s loyal audience in New York. With “A Second Hand Memory,” Allen’s luck may have completely run out. 
Natan Sharansky, Israeli Cabinet minister and former Soviet dissident, proves in his latest book that converts are often the truest believers. With "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom To Overcome Tyranny & Terror," Sharansky, educated to love Stalin, displays a faith rivaling Thomas Paine's in the power of democracy. "The Case for Democracy" traces Sharansky's evolution from prisoner to global political thinker, while arguing that all people yearn to be free. The book posits not only that democracy is a guarantor of our rights as Americans to pursue life, liberty and happiness, but also that it would usher in true peace if all peoples of the world adopted it.
Jewish Agency officials hailed as a positive first step media reports Saturday that Germany will stop offering unlimited immigration and generous social benefits to Jews from the former Soviet Union. According to the German media, starting in January 2006 only FSU Jews who are under the age of 45 and familiar with the German language will be eligible to immigrate.
