Avirama Golan

It behooves liberals like Friedmann to strive for a complete separation between the Orthodox establishment and the state, and to work for the creation of a civil code free from religion, one that will allow anyone who so wishes to marry and have a family.

The outrageous slap that Amnon de Hartog gave MK Yakov Cohen blurred the evil that gave birth to it.

The cultural norm in Israel is changing. The offensive Israeli expression 'she gives' has been completely wiped out. Sex is no longer seen as merchandise that girls give and boys take.

MKs who pretend to represent a liberal and humanistic agenda, of whom a mere 20 remained in the plenum for the vote, will face the most basic test of civics in the coming votes. If they fail it, they will be responsible for an additional deterioration of Israel's democracy - which indeed needs protection.

Even within the confusion and the panic, Labor voters would do well to understand that under Barak's leadership the party will lose any chance of constituting an alternative.

The Orthodox establishment has over the last few years fortified the walls that prevent hundreds of thousands of people from joining the State of Israel and its society as citizens with equal rights.

The leaders of the national-religious sector have presented Israeli society with an odd mix: There are the rabbis who visited the Temple Mount and encouraged a mass pilgrimage to the site, and there are also two bills submitted by MK Zevulun Orlev to redefine the nature of public activity on Shabbat.

War after war, I lost my best friends and felt the pain of other friends who lost their children. I fly the flag in their honor, because I do not have the right to turn my back on their lives and their deaths.

The new kibbutz is not an ideal place, but it has bid farewell to the rigid fairy tale of equality that created many distortions and now offers an interesting model for communal life, in which one can find both security and a social challenge.

A committee formed by the Ministry of Education has recommended assigning psychologists to the delegations of teenagers traveling to Poland.

Women returned to the same questions: to have a child or not, to stay at home with the next generation or to develop a career. The inherently understood way in Israel of stubbornly trying to combine work and a profession with a relationship, motherhood and family seems to be a mission impossible for German women.

Now the ball is in the court of secular women. If they dare to accept the challenge, the call will become the first step in breaking the Orthodox monopoly and realigning the feminist struggle on the basis of fundamental social and cultural interests, which cross the artificial border between "religious" and "secular."

As national commemoration becomes increasingly privatized, and mourning more and more personal, it seems that the struggle of the bereaved parents from the helicopter crash against the authorities is simply part of a general disintegration.

The new justice minister, Professor Daniel Friedmann, is one of the most brilliant and well-educated jurists in Israel whose writings in the field of Hebrew law and the Bible are a cultural and philosophical jewel.

Bruised and crumbling as it is, Israeli society must cease to measure obligations and rights by the old formula.

Judging by the reactions to the latest court rulings dealing with a woman's right to her body, it appears that Israeli society is undergoing a change in its attitude toward equality between the sexes.

The story begins with good intentions. Businessman Lev Leviev met with the education minister a few months ago and proposed that he would fund and operate, via religious instructors, a program for enrichment in Judaism for the younger grades in the state elementary system. From hereon, the versions of what transpired diverge.

From this day forth, if he has a version and she has a version, his voice has no assured advantage, even if he is arrogant and she is just a young woman.

The more the third sector grows, the easier it is for the state to wash its hands of its duties to its citizens.

MK Yuri Stern (Yisrael Beiteinu), who passed away last week, before his time, was a rare politician. It is hard to find a public figure here who is mourned by organizations and individuals from such a wide and extreme range of the ideological and political spectrum.

What is Kadima, if not a mechanism for arranging jobs, lacking any political or ideological principles, and based entirely on the system perfected by the Likud Central Committee? That is what is left at the top levels of Israel?s government.

An execution is a very severe form of murder. A murderer kills on behalf of himself or any other organization or principle that leads him to commit murder.

The amendment being proposed by Nahari will turn the state school steam into something marginal and make all ?the others,? the private ones, central.

An El Al flight that took off for Brussels 10 days ago included a large contingent of Haredi Jews - men, women and children - who boarded with great excitement and many coats, carry-ons and hats.