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
    Israel/Palestine, Occupation
    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.
    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.

  • Journalists in the Occupied Territories under attack
    Israel/Palestine, Occupation
    Joel Campagna is Middle East coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
    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.

  • Does Judaism have a 'boy crisis'?
    Religion, Feminism, Jewish Life
    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.”
    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?