X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Ari Ben-Menashe


Ari Ben-Menashe

Legendary Israeli spy Rafi Eitan told author Gordon Thomas, for Thomas' book Gideon's Spies, that he had worked with Ben-Menashe on setting up the US-Israeli network for covertly supplying arms to Iran, and had collaborated with Ben-Menashe on using PROMIS for espionage.

Ben-Menashe moved to Sydney, Australia in 1992, then to Montreal, Canada, where he married a Canadian woman and became a citizen.

Ben-Menashe first came to public prominence in 1989, when he was arrested in the US on 3 November for violating the Arms Export Control Act for trying to sell three Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to Iran using false end-user certificates.

Ben-Menashe claimed that Robert Maxwell, then owner of Mirror Group newspapers in the UK, was a Mossad agent, and that Maxwell had tipped off the Israeli embassy in 1986 about Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, after Vanunu and a friend approached the Sunday Mirror and The Sunday Times in London with a story about Israel's nuclear capability.


Chezki Lifshitz

Chezki Lifshitz was born in 1974 to Tzvi Menashe and Ester Lifshitz in Bnei Brak, Israel, he Studied in Chabad Yeshiva Ktana of Lod, and Yeshiva Gdola of Kfar Chabad.

New and Selected Poems

The 2009 printing by Bloodaxe Books also features a DVD of the film Life is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe by Pamela Robertson-Pearce.

David Orr, writing in The New York Times, described Menashe as a "wry but essentially optimistic poet, and his best writing demonstrates that the stylistic limitations we choose quickly cease to be limitations, even when we identify them as such", singling out Menashe's poem "The Niche" for praise.

Samuel Menashe

Prominent poets, critics and editors who have admired Menashe's work include Dana Gioia, Denis Donoghue, Billy Collins, Geordie Greig, and Christopher Ricks.


see also