Lawrence Rifkin

Lawrence Rifkin is the former Senior Editor of The Jerusalem Post. He studied journalism at the University of Connecticut and in the ensuing years worked for a number of leading media outlets, including CBS News, where he was the network's longtime radio correspondent for Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also was a spokesman for the late, legendary Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, a lecturer for the IDF and Jewish Agency, and an information emissary to the United States for the World Zionist Organization. He translated from Hebrew to English the book G-suit: Combat Reports from Israel's Air War, and spent several years growing apples, pears, grapes and avocados on a kibbutz in the center of the country. Rifkin and his wife, the parents of a Jewish Agency emissary and a soldier, live in Jerusalem. Email lawrence at larry@jpost.1eye.us.

Illustrative photo

GRUMPY OLD MAN: Those howling echoes

Echo chambers are supposed to make us feel secure in our beliefs. In reality, they just make us deaf.

JUNE 1, 2018

Garbage dumped in the Old City

A united Jerusalem? Would that it were so

MAY 16, 2018

NOBLE ENERGY’S Sedco Express sits atop the Tamar field, which began supplying Israel with natural gas in 2013

Grumpy Old Man: A gold mine – but whose?

It’s one thing to argue about fair prices for our natural gas – it’s another thing entirely to ensure that the royalties are distributed equitably.

MAY 3, 2018

GRUMPY OLD MAN: The conspiracy theorist

Netanyahu seeks to distract us from a problem of his own making by picking low-hanging fruit and telling us to blame it and not him.

APRIL 18, 2018

PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu attends a ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, April 2018

Standing in judgment

There is an enormous and even unbridgeable disparity between wanting your son’s body back and wanting your son back.

APRIL 7, 2018

(LEFT) IDF soldier Gilad Schalit is seen while being held captive on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing in 2011. Right: IDF SOLDIER Hadar Goldin is seen in this undated family handout provided in 2014

Toeing the line

Not everyone understands coexistence the same way, whether along the demarcation between Jew and Arab or that between Jew and Jew.

MARCH 22, 2018

JERUSALEM MAYOR Teddy Kollek (left) points out special landmarks to then-prime minister Shimon Peres during a walking tour of Jerusalem in 1985

GRUMPY OLD MAN: The photo on the wall

He’s innocent until proven guilty, but all those police cases against Benjamin Netanyahu should have his supporters rethinking their stance.

MARCH 7, 2018

PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, (right) depart from the White House

The Polish joke

In saying that even Jews ‘perpetrated’ the Holocaust, Poland’s prime minister delivered a very unfunny punchline.

FEBRUARY 21, 2018

POLAND’S PRIME Minister Mateusz Morawiecki

Sara on our minds

It’s an obsession the way we watch the prime minister’s wife. If she could only do something to finally make us lose interest.

FEBRUARY 9, 2018

SARA NETANYAHU shakes hands with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks on, in New Delhi January 2018

Due diligence

If Shlomo Karhi’s mock-primary win is any indication, Likud activists are getting fed up with jerks

JANUARY 25, 2018

ISRAELIS TAKE PART in a protest against corruption in Tel Aviv last year

Grumpy old man: You’re judged by the friends you keep

Why do we always have to be in the news alongside dictators, despots and White House wackos?

JANUARY 11, 2018

PROTESTERS IN Gaza City begin stomping on posters depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump and Israeli and American flags before burning them during a protest following Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Invitation to an intifada: Part 2

Thirty years on, a former soldier recounts 30 days that opened his eyes to the price of occupation

DECEMBER 13, 2017

A PALESTINIAN woman and an Israeli soldier exchange glances as he passes her house in Rafah, at the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, 10 days after the start of the first intifada in 1987

Invitation to an intifada: Part 1

Thirty years on, a former soldier recounts 30 days that opened his eyes to the price of occupation

NOVEMBER 29, 2017

‘OTHER THAN a crash course in crowd control, we were never trained for this.’ The author (foreground) with two other members of his platoon near the village of Yanta, deep in eastern Lebanon, on June 12, 1982, the day after the cease-fire with the Syrians