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by Esther Cohen Lemlich Award photos by Emily Holzknecht Every year, for one reason or another, I find myself at far too many events to count, to remember, or even to record. Many of these events are worthy. Most are not memorable. An exception, these last four years, is one of my favorite nights: The […]
Read Moreby Alan Elsner, J Street While the United States and five other powers worked to reach a diplomatic agreement with Iran to halt its nuclear program in exchange for allowing Tehran access to a few billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets, Israeli officials and their U.S. allies have railed against the deal using almost apocalyptic […]
Read MoreIsraeli warplanes destroyed a suspected nuclear facility in eastern Syria on this date in 2007. “Operation Orchard” involved years of investigation by Israeli intelligence of Syrian nuclear weaponry development with North Korea and Iran, two on-the-ground reconnaisance mission by Israeli commandos, and an airstrike involving as many as eight planes. Immediately after, Israeli Prime Minister […]
Read MoreThe first nuclear attack in history took place on this date in 1945 when the city of Hiroshima was largely destroyed by a single bomb dropped by an American B-29. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki was similarly destroyed, and Japan surrendered six days after that, ending World War II. The nuclear bomb was […]
Read MoreThe hot line, also known as the red phone, directly connecting the White House and the Kremlin, was installed on this date in 1963, prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962. (During the crisis, it had taken the U.S. nearly 12 hours to receive and decode the USSR’s first settlement offering.) The hot […]
Read MoreSolly Zuckerman Thorpe, a pioneering primatologist, scientific adviser to the British military, activist for nuclear disarmament, and “the last evangelist of the Enlightenment,” as Charles Foster called him, was born on this date in 1904 in Cape Town, South Africa. Zuckerman moved to England in 1926 and taught at Oxford between 1934 and 1945. During […]
Read MoreNobelist George Wald, who discovered that Vitamin A was a component of the retina and crucial to good eyesight, was born in New York to Jewish immigrant parents on this date in 1906. Wald was working in Switzerland and Germany when Hitler came to power. He returned to the U.S. in 1934 and took a […]
Read MoreAstronomer and science writer Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1934. He was best known as the awe-inspired and -inspiring host and co-writer of the television series COSMOS: A Personal Voyage, and as the driving force behind the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence program (SETI) of NASA, which monitors radio signals and […]
Read MoreSir Joseph Rotblat, a physicist who received the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on nuclear disarmament, was born in Poland on this date in 1908. Prior to World War II, the mostly self-taught Rotblat conducted experiments in nuclear fission that anticipated the power of nuclear explosions. When World War II broke out, he […]
Read MoreBella Abzug helped launch Women Strike for Peace on this date in 1961, when some fifty thousand women, mostly middle-class mothers of young children in over sixty communities, demonstrated to demand that President John F. Kennedy “End the Arms Race Not the Human Race.” This was prompted by the Soviet resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing […]
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