NEW YORK – The last time the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance organized a conference at Columbia University, in 2007, Israeli activist Tova Hartman electrified a crowd of several hundred with her call to “stop kvetching” and start acting until the plight of “chained women,” or agunot, was resolved.

“Let this be the last JOFA conference where we need to ask if there’s a halachic heter [permissive legal ruling] for agunot,” Hartman said of women seeking divorces from husbands refusing them a religious writ of divorce, or get.

The audience roared its approval.

Three years later, Hartman has her wish. Agunot activists are no longer asking if methods consistent with Jewish law exist to help such women; they know that they do.

WASHINGTON – Last summer, when the relationship between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations was getting off to what appeared to be a rocky start, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was at pains — twice — to deny that he had been “summoned” to the State Department for a dressing down.

One such “meeting” was actually a friendly phone call, he said, and the other was a routine getting-to-know-you meeting. The distinction was key, he told journalists: When the State Department actually “summons” an envoy, “that’s serious.”

Welcome to the serious zone: Oren’s spokesman, Jonathan Peled, confirmed to JTA that the ambassador indeed had been “summoned” for a meeting last Friday with James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state. The summons came as the controversy engendered by Israel’s announcement of new construction in eastern Jerusalem during last week’s visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden showed no sign of abating.

In response to the Obama administration’s stepped-up criticism of Israeli building plans in Jerusalem, Jewish groups are slamming the White House for failing to speak out more against Palestinian incitement.

Particularly galling, several Jewish organizational leaders said, is that the administration has ratcheted up its criticism of Israel while failing to utter a word about the decision of the Palestinian Authority to go through with plans to name a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist who led a 1978 bus hijacking in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were killed.

JERUSALEM – For Sindy Benavides, a Hispanic community organizer from Virginia who was visiting Israel last week, the Jewish community is a newfound friend.

Three years ago, Benavides said, she had the “frightening” experience of seeing the number of anti-immigration bills introduced in the Virginia House of Representatives triple to 148 — a reaction, she said, to the influx of Latino immigrants in the area.

With funding and training from the American Jewish Committee, Benavides and her fellow Latino community members mobilized to defeat about 100 of the bills in the 2006-07 legislative session — all those whose passage ran counter to the interests of their community.

The minaret and the satellite dish offer a sharp contrast between centuries of tradition and belief, and the promise and perils that lie ahead in the Middle East.

Building on that image, Avi Melamed — Jerusalem native, former Israeli intelligence officer, scholar of Middle Eastern studies, and teacher — spoke Tuesday night about the ferment in the region.

In a presentation sponsored by UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey at its offices in Paramus, Melamed spoke of a deep identity crisis in the Arab Muslim world, citing increasing political unrest, the influence of radical Islam, and the tension between Sunnis and Shiites as major factors.

The 40-year-old Glen Rock finalist in Redbook Magazine’s national “Hottest Husband” contest is also one of the only Jews among the 22 lucky guys. A Jewish hottie? Well, his wife certainly thinks so; she’s the one who nominated him.

“I’d like to go on the record that this is extremely embarrassing for me,” Bryan Kule told The Jewish Standard. Nevertheless, he added, “I’m flattered that my wife thought enough of me to put me in there.”

Kule said she told him about the nomination after she was informed that he made the finals.

Pundits and politicians have taken recently to comparing Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion.

No less a figure than President Shimon Peres, one of Ben-Gurion’s foremost disciples, is the latest Israeli leader to offer the accolade.

The reason is simple: Like Ben-Gurion, Fayyad is building institutions of statehood.

In the 1920s, the Jews of Palestine under the single-minded Ben-Gurion established institutions for what they called the state-in-the-making: the Haganah, with the idea of a single armed force; the Histadrut Trade Union, with a department for workers’ rights, a sick fund, a bank, and the Solel Boneh construction company; and the Jewish Agency, dealing with immigration, schools, and hospitals.