Dear friends, We urgently need native English speakers to translate articles from Hebrew (one or two per month, each about 1000 words) on a voluntary basis. Challenge is an E-Magazine focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as trends in…
Article Author: Ben Efrat, Roni
Helena Ruegg and the Bandoneón: An underground passage from Tango to Yiddish
Bandoneón players are rare, female bandoneónists even rarer, but that is Helena Ruegg. She visited Israel and Palestine in November 2010, meeting with Jewish and Arab musicians. The Workers Advice Center, WAC-MAAN, invited her to perform, and she responded with…
When Art Breaks Walls: The Bread and Roses Exhibit of 2010
Once a year, in January, a meeting point is created between artists and farm workers. The artists are both Jewish and Arab. The workers are Arab women. The contact is made through an art exhibit called Bread and Roses, organized…
Camp David in July 2000: What Went Wrong
From Challenge No. 65 January-February 2001 If anyone still believed that US President Bill Clinton could serve as a fair mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the latest bridging proposal ought to have ended the illusion. Arab journalists dub it “the…
The Gaza War Strengthened Israel’s Far Right
ODA focused on poverty and unemployment The results of the elections to Israel’s 18th Knesset clearly bolstered the far Right, which won 65 of the parliament’s 120 seats. This outcome is partly due to the paralysis that beset Ehud Olmert’s…
Letter to our Readers
After 14 years of publishing Challenge, the editorial board and I have decided to continue the magazine online and to cancel the bimonthly print edition. In October we notified our subscribers of this, and my mailbox has been flowing ever since…
Why Israel Can’t Attack Iran
Accompanying its verbal escalations over the Iranian nuclear project, Israel ventured on an extraordinary air force exercise in early June. According to the New York Times, this included more than 100 F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, which flew west 900 miles…
Mammon in Zion
“WHAT’S happening today is Marx’s revenge. Marx taught us that ideologies often serve as a superstructure camouflaging the real issues. Today there is no more camouflage. Mammon stands before us nakedly proclaiming: ‘I am thy God, O Israel!’” This is…
The Third Choice
THE BLOOD still boils at the sights that came out of Gaza when Israel invaded in March. At least 107 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians. Houses collapsed on their inhabitants. Hamas went underground, so that the “strongest army in the…
The First Imperative
MARKING the third anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death, Fatah’s big show of power on the streets of Gaza (November 12, 2007) drew an extremely violent reaction from Hamas. Its security forces killed seven demonstrators and wounded sixty or more. It…