Author Archives: Rachel Bayefsky

One day in Brussels this summer my wonderfully British supervisor, after asking whether anyone wanted tea, paused, and turned to me and my fellow intern. “Oh, of course. Happy Fourth of July to all you Americans!” she said. I received similar congratulations from many people in the capital of Europe that day. Americans were treated »

It’s tough for a social science major like me to understand obscure mathematical technical terms, but apparently there is a “division” between the humanities and the sciences at Yale. If there’s anything that huffing and puffing from Sloane Physics Laboratory to the Old Art Gallery in a 10-minute interval for a semester taught me, it »

Life at Yale tends to settle into a routine. It’s all too easy to go to similar parties every weekend, to listen to the same type of music, to eat food we think we’ve seen the day before. But one of the greatest potential sources of excitement and reinvigoration is the opportunity to look beyond »

In August 2005, Israel withdrew its settlers and ground forces from the Gaza Strip. No longer could terrorist acts be justified by pointing to Israeli occupation. No longer would Israel control the lives of 1.4 million Palestinians. At least that was the hope. For the past 15 months, however, Israel’s willingness to concede territory unilaterally »

From an American perspective, last Tuesday’s Israeli election contained elements of the bizarre. Israel borders a territory that has just been taken over by a terrorist organization sworn to destroy it. A state whose nuclear weapons ambitions are being considered by the Security Council has threatened Israel with extinction. And yet at election time, interest »

Imagine sitting in a room with respected Yale professors, listening to a Yale-invited speaker humiliate fellow students and deride American Jewry’s “level of mental hysteria” about Holocaust denial. You needn’t stretch your powers of imagination too far; such a scene unfolded last Thursday night in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, where Norman Finkelstein expounded on “Israel and Palestine: »