On top of the world
(The Jerusalem Report, July 13, 2012)
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR / MATTHEW KALMAN
From The Jerusalem Report, issue dated July 30, 2012
SOME ACHIEVEMENTS ARE SO extraordinary they reduce the rest of us to silent awe. Winning an Olympic gold medal. Becoming a Nobel laureate. Landing on the Moon. Climbing Mount Everest.
In May, 24-year-old Israeli mountaineer Nadav Ben Yehuda stepped beyond the roof of the world and entered the realm of legend. “Whoever saves a life, it is as if they saved an entire world,” the Talmud teaches. Just a few hundreds yards from the summit of Everest, Ben Yehuda turned back to save the life of Aydin Irmak, a fellow climber he had befriended back in Kathmandu.
Robert Slater is a veteran reporter with thousands of interviews and dozens of books to his credit, but I have rarely seen him as excited and inspired as he was on returning from his meeting with Ben Yehuda, whose extraordinary story he tells in The man who saved the world in this issue.
Read the full article HERE
In search of memory
(The Jerusalem Report, June 28, 2012)
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR / MATTHEW KALMAN
From The Jerusalem Report, issue dated July 16, 2012
MEMORIES, BOTH RECENT AND ANCIENT, HAVE A huge influence in shaping the modern Middle East mindset.
A couple of years ago, chemistry professor Awad Abu-Freih took me to Al-Araqib, the Bedouin village near Beersheba where he grew up in a corrugated iron hut with no running water or electricity. The makeshift hamlet of 50 families surrounded by the inhospitable scrub land of southern Israel’s Negev Desert is one of dozens of “unrecognized” villages which are home to about half of the 190,000 Bedouin living there.
Abu-Freih triumphed over these miserable conditions to win a coveted place at the Haifa Technion-Israel Institute of Technology where he joined a ground-breaking chemistry research group and became the first Bedouin in Israel to earn a PhD In science.
But officially, he has no home. It has been destroyed countless times by government contractors because legally it does not exist.
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A Golden Age of Jewish Media
(Honest Reporting, June 20, 2012)
I unpack the new media strategy of The Jerusalem Report and ask what role an old-style print magazine can fulfil in this web-savvy era.
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Archaeology in a hole
(The Jerusalem Report, June 14, 2012)
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR / MATTHEW KALMAN
From The Jerusalem Report, issue dated July 2, 2012
I discuss my experience covering the seven-year antuquities forgery trial in Jerusalem and reveal the widespread concerns about the policies of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
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A modest millionaire
(The Jerusalem Report, May 30, 2012)
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR / MATTHEW KALMAN
From The Jerusalem Report, issue dated June 18, 2012
WHEN ISRAELIS SING “IF I WERE A rich man” in Hebrew, they sing “If I were a Rothschild.” It’s not often you get to meet someone whose very name is a legend, so I tagged along when Robert Slater went to interview Lord Jacob Rothschild for our cover story. What impressed me most was his modesty.
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