Author: NY TIMES

The Oct. 7 attack on Israel has prompted soul-searching on the Israeli left, undermining faith in a shared future with Palestinians. It has created a crisis of confidence on the Israeli right, sapping support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It has drawn ultra-Orthodox Jews, often ambivalent about their relationship to the Israeli state, closer to the mainstream.Across religious and political divides, Israelis are coming to terms with what the Hamas-led terrorist attack meant for Israel as a state, for Israelis as a society, and for its citizens as individuals. Just as Israel’s failures in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war ultimately upended…

For months, Ukraine’s use of powerful Western-supplied air-defense systems to repel Russian missile attacks has provided its citizens with some reassurance that a protective shield was effectively in place over big cities such as the capital, Kyiv.On Friday, that shield partly cracked.In one of the biggest air assaults of the war, Russia launched so many missiles that the Ukrainian defenses seem to have been overloaded. Faced with a complex barrage of different airborne weapons, the Ukrainian Air Force said it had shot down only 87 of the 122 missiles fired by Moscow, about 70 percent of the total, with all…

On and off social media, watermelons are being used as a symbol to communicate solidarity with Palestinians in the deadly war between Israel and Hamas.The fruit is painted on semicircles of cardboard at protests in support of Palestinians. The watermelon emoji appears next to the Palestinian flag in display names on TikTok and X, and thousands of Instagram users have liked an illustration of a watermelon wedge whose seeds spell “ceasefire now.”The fruit is grown in Gaza and the West Bank, and it is the same four colors — red, green, black and white — as the Palestinian flag. Palestinians…

Mr. Granger had an early interest in food, bringing his parents a “silver service” of breakfast in bed from the age of 5 and working his way through magazine recipe cards, before turning his attention to the food writers Elizabeth David and Margaret Fulton. He feasted on Melbourne’s richly diverse cuisine, eating dim sum with the Chinese parents of a childhood friend and searching out Lebanese kofta, African curry and the “most pungent” Parmesan, he wrote in his most recent cookbook, “Australian Food” (2020).Like his father, he went to Mentone Grammar School, a private boys’ school at the time. In…

‘Fast Charlie’Rent or buy on most major platforms.I never knew I needed to hear Pierce Brosnan with a Southern accent until Phillip Noyce’s “Fast Charlie.” The former Bond plays the titular “problem solver,” as he calls himself, cooler than a summer breeze. A turf war between his boss, Stan (James Caan in one of his final film roles) and a New Orleans gangster named Beggar (Gbenga Akinnagbe) results in the apparent murder of Stan and his entire crew, pushing Charlie to seek vengeance before Beggar finds him, too. Charlie’s predicament also envelops his lover, Marcie (Morena Baccarin), a sharp-talking taxidermist.Charlie…

Before Oct. 7, Hana Cooper downloaded everything from daily news reports to rabbinic blog posts, saving them for posterity in the Israeli National Library’s archive of the Israeli internet and the broader Jewish online world.But within days of the Hamas-led attacks, Ms. Cooper began spending her time archiving violent images of the assault, many of them posted by the attackers themselves on digital platforms like Telegram.“It was surreal,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview. “I was working with the same tools, but in a completely different world. The war became everything that I did.”Israel’s cultural sector had to reconstitute itself…

The Biden administration is bypassing Congress for the second time since the start of the war in Gaza for a weapons sale to Israel, a move that comes amid growing anger at the United States over its backing of Israel as the Gaza death toll rises and misery spreads.The State Department said late Friday that it had approved a proposed $147.5 million sale of artillery munitions and related equipment to Israel, invoking an emergency provision that avoids a congressional review process generally required for arms sales to other nations. The department used the same provision this month to facilitate a…

When Judy Pellarin had her daughters three decades ago, she and her husband gave them her last name instead of his. A generation later, her daughters also broke tradition — one gave her daughter her surname, and the other created a new name, a blending of her and her husband’s middle names.Though some families have deviated from the patrilineal tradition for decades, they remain part of a small minority. Even as many gender norms have changed over the generation since Ms. Pellarin named her children, the tradition of giving babies their fathers’ surnames remains so strong as to be almost…

For most of the last year, my inbox has been overflowing with tales from people like these:Every person — more than 1,000 wrote to me and my colleague Tara Siegel Bernard — volunteered a story of losing banking and credit-card accounts and included contact information. It’s not the sort of thing most people normally do if they have something to hide.Banks say they need to close accounts they deem suspicious to prevent money laundering, fraud and terrorist financing. In addition, regulators are pressuring them to sniff harder for signs of dirty dealings.But there are many frustrating things about this phenomenon:…

‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’ (Jan. 22)Stream it here.The director Yorgos Lanthimos and the actor Barry Keoghan have two of the most talked-about movies of the fall in “Poor Things” and “Saltburn”; back in 2017, they collaborated on a film that makes both of those efforts seem comparatively tame. Colin Farrell stars as a seemingly normal heart surgeon whose peculiar interactions with Keoghan, the son of a former patient, escalate into deeply troubling territory. Farrell strikes a perfect key of revealing nothing without hiding anything, Nicole Kidman is excellent as his wife (with secrets of her own) and Keoghan’s…