Naomi Ragen is an American-born novelist, playwright and journalist who has lived in Jerusalem since 1971 and who writes regularly in the Jerusalem Post and to her mailing list about Israel and Jewish issues.
Naomi has published nine internationally best selling novels, and is the author of a hit play (Women's Minyan) which has been performed more than 500 times in Israel's National Theatre (Habimah) as well as in the United States and Argentina. She is a tireless advocate for women's rights in Israel, campaigning against gender segregation on Israeli buses and bias in rabbinical courts.
Naomi is a sought-after lecturer all over the world. If your group is interested in hosting Naomi, please click here.
Women to the Back of the Bus!!
The latest craze - modesty glasses for Orthodox Jewish men so they won't be able to see women.
I Am Not Sitting in the Back of the Bus - Why, together with other women, I filed suit to put an end to the primitive and degrading gender-segregated bus lines now popping up all over Israel.
Read my original article about how I was attacked by a religious fanatic because I refused to move to the back (the "women's section") of a Jerusalem bus.
Read about an American woman beaten because she refused to move to the back of a Jerusalem bus.
Read my article explaining why segregated buses are just the latest crazy idea of fanatics with too much free time on their hands.
Read about haredi women who want to sit with their families and don't want to be forced to crowd together in the back of the bus.
Israel Bus Rule Sparks Religious Row - How the liberal western media perceive all this fanaticism.
To see these scenes repeated in Boston filled me with a terrible sadness.
It was all so sickeningly familiar: the happy crowds, the sudden ear-shattering explosions, the dazed and wounded lying bloodied on the ground. Like every Israeli who lived through the nightmare years following the Oslo Accords, which allowed terrorists free access to our cities and countryside, I can recall weeks and months when such scenes seemed like an almost daily occurrence.
To see these scenes repeated in Boston filled me with a terrible sadness.
After my birthplace, New York, Boston is my favorite city in America, one with which I became intimately familiar when my son was at Harvard a few years back.
A college town filled with ambitious young people, a town of libraries and bookstores and institutions of higher learning, it’s a cultured place, a city …
This video is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever seen about those who would boycott Israel!
Please watch and please forward it to your friends. It starts with an advertisement in Hebrew (which you can skip) and then some Arabic text, but don’t worry, keep going. It’s in English with Hebrew subtitles.
The festivities for Israel’s 65th Independence Day are in full swing. But for us in Israel, before the hora dancing, the plastic hammers, and the fireworks, there are the sirens. Two minutes of time to stand and think.
First, the siren goes off for Holocaust Memorial Day. It stops traffic. We get out on the highway, eyes closed, hearts heavy. The scenes rip through our souls: emaciated bodies in piles, starving children in rags, family members ripped apart and sent to their death in factory-like settings conceived by meticulous Germans with their talent for efficiency. We are there, all of us, the devout and the atheist, dressed in black gabardine and the latest Paris fashions, stuffed altogether into box-cars, locked in, helpless. Jews.
The siren seems to go on forever. Then it stops. We breathe again. We go back to …
Since the publication of An American in Israel in Friday’s Jerusalem Post, I’ve been inundated by people anxious to know whom to contact to protest the anti-Semitic an anti-Israel behavior of the US Consulate in Jerusalem.
This is what I suggest:
Forward a copy of my article to friends and mailing list and your Facebook page. You can find sharing buttons at the bottom of the article. Forward a copy to both US Senators and Congressmen expressing your outrage, and demanding a change in the Jerusalem Consulate that reflects American values, not pro-Palestinian bias. You can find US senator contact information here. For House members, click here. You can also call the Jerusalem Consulate at (international dialing code) 972 2 622 7250. Keep in mind that Israel time is 7 hours ahead of US Eastern Standard Time (for example, if …
The American consulate seems to be exclusively aimed at benefiting West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians.
Remember that scene in “Not Without My Daughter” when Sally Field sees the American flag waving over the American Embassy in Istanbul as she flees Iran? “We’re home baby, we’re home,” she tells her daughter.
Every American abroad knows that feeling. Unfortunately for us Jewish Americans forced to use the American Consulate in Jerusalem, it hasn’t felt like home for some time.
It started during the intifada, when, despite daily terrorist threats in the streets of Jerusalem aimed at Jews, the Consulate forced us to go to east Jerusalem to renew our passports and even to bring our newborns there for birth certificates. It literally felt as if a person was taking her life into her hands. Once there, she took her place outside …
No, 103 years sounds like a good number to me. As Esther’s brother pointed out: “If my sister lives to be 120, that’s about the same number of years she’ll have to live with what he’s done to her.”
On Tuesday, January 22, Justice John G. Ingram of New York’s State Supreme Court sentenced convicted child molester Nechemya Weberman to 103 years behind bars for 59 counts of sexual abuse against a little girl sent to him by her school, the UTA Satmar, for religious counseling. In passing sentence, the judge praised the young victim for her “courage and bravery in coming forward.”
After speaking to her briefly on the phone last week and having a long talk with her older brother, who lives here in Jerusalem, I must say I believe she heartily deserves this compliment. I now have …
While Weberman is behind bars, many are still unnamed and continue to destroy the souls of young boys and girls because of a conspiracy of silence surrounding rabbinical sexual misconduct.
The case was horrific. A 17-year-old girl from the Satmar community in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn testified that she was forced by her school to attend “counseling sessions” from age 12 to 15 because she wore stockings that were too thin and asked too many questions about God. Instead of religious mentoring, three times a week she found herself behind a thrice-locked door with a bed, face to face with a fifty-ish, overweight, unlicensed “counselor,” a father of ten who forced her to watch pornographic movies and perform sexual acts.
The defendant, Nechemya Weberman, had risen from the humble post of driver for the Satmar Rebbe to the go-to …
December 2012 - Naomi's play Women's Minyan was performed by the West Boca Theatre Company at the Levis JCC in Boca Raton, Florida. Read some reviews.
18 November 2012 - Naomi participated in the Salon du livre de la Communauté de Neuilly-sur-Seine at the Hôtel Marriott in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
17 November 2012 - Naomi spoke at an evening organised for Emounah-Boulogne at the Synagogue de Boulogne in Boulogne, France.
11 November 2012 - Naomi participated in the Salon des Écrivains du B'nai B'rith at the Mairie du 16ème in Paris, France.
5 November 2012 - Naomi spoke at the Cockfosters and North Southgate Synagogue in London, England.
October 2012 כמיהה לעדן יוצא לאור בעברית , ומיד קופץ למספר ראשון ברשימות רבי-המכר בישראל
29 April 2012 - At the First Annual Jerusalem Post Conference at New York's Marriott Times Square Hotel, Naomi was a featured panelist along with Mr. Ron Prosor, Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations, Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Mr. Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents. The subject was the media war against the delegitimization of Israel.
15 March 2012 - Sotah was published in Italian as L'amora proibito. Read a
review (in Italian). March 2012 - Jephte's Daughter was published in an Italian paperback edition, as Una moglie a Gerusalemme. October 2011 - The Ghost of Hannah Mendes was published in French as Le Fantôme de Dona Gracia Mendes.
Read a
review (in French). October 2011 - The Tenth Song was published in paperback.
May 2011 - Four-time Tony nominee Tovah Feldshuh directed a staged reading of Women's Minyan at New York's Westside Theater. The reading was produced by One Circle Productions, in partnership with Safe Horizon.
April 2011 - The Tenth Song was published in Hebrew, as השיר העשירי.
January 2011 - Israel Supreme Court declared gender segregation on buses illegal, but said women may continue to "voluntarily" move to the back of the bus.
January 2011 - Jephte's Daughter was published in Italian, as Una moglie a Gerusalemme. October 2010 - The Tenth Song was published.
October 2010 - Jephte's Daughter was published in French, as fille de Jephte.
November 2010 - The French edition of Sotah was awarded the Prix WiZO for 2010.
June 2009 - Sotah was published in French.
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