Lev Stesin

The author lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a founding member of San Francisco Voice for Israel.

 PARTICIPANTS CELEBRATE at an annual Birthright event, at the Jerusalem International Convention Center in 2014. If US Jews need a free trip to convince them to travel to Israel, the future of the community is catastrophic, says the writer.

The Jewish people have grown apart - opinion

 THEN-PRIME MINISTER Naftali Bennett meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, last year.

Putin: A fascist or misunderstood? - opinion

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin prepares to speak at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow on Wednesday.

Russia's harsh condemnation of Israel - What does it mean for the future?


Middle East needs to think globally, but unite locally - opinion

The US is withdrawing militarily and disengaging diplomatically.

A U.S. Marine observes an Iranian fast attack craft from USS John P. Murtha during a Strait of Hormuz transit, Arabian Sea off Oman, in this picture released by U.S. Navy on July 18, 2019

US politics and American Jewry: It never was the way it was

For the vast majority of American Jews, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were the first contenders for the major party nomination who expressed strikingly anti-Israel and anti-AIPAC attitudes.

‘WHAT ARE the effects, in Israel, in the US, and the rest of the world, of the perceived opinions of American Jewry?’

The Polish question of the Middle East

Persecutions and institutional violence had been a consistent aspect of the European Jewish experience.

Kurds celebrate to show their support for the upcoming September 25th independence referendum in Erbil, Iraq September 22, 2017.

The shot at Caracas

The currently unfolding crisis in Venezuela presents another hopeful in the long series of tragic mistakes of political math.

Juan Guaido, President of Venezuela's National Assembly, holds a copy of Venezuelan constitution during a rally against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government and to commemorate the 61st anniversary of the end of the dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez in Caracas, Venezuela January 23, 20

The new antisemitism: Loving the dead, hating the living

Linda Sarsour and her comrades realized to their own surprise and astonishment, one does not have to restrict one’s love only to the dead Jews of the Holocaust: other dead Jews are as good.

WOMEN’S MARCH organizers Carmen Perez, Tamika D. Mallory and Linda Sarsour take the stage during a protest called March for Racial Justice in New York City. (Reuters)

70 years young!

To be Jewish is to be part of that collective of the people of Israel.

Israeli flag waving at a Tel Aviv beach.

The world and us

Jews don’t own the narrative of WWII.

Haredi man in Jerusalem

Let there be tree!

The Soviet Jews have played a significant role in making the Christmas tree kosher.

IS THIS a secular symbol, too?

The Lessons of October


The ghosts of the past

American Jews are nostalgic for the days long gone, when after the Second World War the shadow of the Holocaust created in America the safest environment the Diaspora has ever experienced.

A STATUE of Confederate general and early member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Nathan Bedford Forrest, stands over his grave in Health Sciences Park in Memphis, Tennessee.