Columns

Facing imminent existential attacks, Israel could decide to preempt enemy aggression with conventional forces.

People are on edge when it comes to the topic of anti-Semitic occurrences in Poland.

Have you ever climbed the wrong mountain? I don't think that anybody who has passed through IDF officers training has not had that experience.

"In a dark time," says the poet Theodore Roethke, "the eye begins to see." Today, with improving sight, the Iranian nuclear threat should remain bright in our visual field. Despite a recent U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that effectively supports Tehran's multiple lies and deceptions, this unconventional threat remains existential. It follows that an Israeli and/or American preemptive strike against certain Iranian nuclear assets and infrastructures should still not be ruled out.

Throughout Jewish history there have been many defining moments.

My readers in The Jewish Press are accustomed to reading my articles on timely strategic and jurisprudential issues. For the most part, these columns have explored various dangers of terrorism, war and genocide. But sometimes we are imperiled by a very different sort of terror. There is, of course, the "usual" threat of terror violence (the terror "outside"), but there is also a serious specter of interior terror that arises from our willful abandonment of individuality (the terror "within").

It was only last week that thousands of Chassidim went to Lejask (Lizhensk) in order to commemorate the 222nd yahrzeit of the tzaddik, Noam Elimelech of Lejask (1717-1786).

The children of Sderot are the finger in the Gaza dike. They are there to save us all from the great flood.

Do you understand the daily rocket attacks against Sderot, Israel?

An event, thought to be impossible after the Shoah, took place in Lodz.

As calls for all-out war on Gaza increase, it is important to set things straight.

Some years ago, following one of the devastating suicide bombings in which small Jewish children were blown to bits, prominent Palestinian columnist Fahd al-Rimawi - then writing with obvious approval of Nobel Peace laureate Yassir Arafat in Amman's al-Majd newspaper, gleefully celebrated the monstrous act of terror:

Over the past few weeks, I have been sharing contact information about various secular organizations in Poland.

If the ideas put forward at the recent Herzliya Conference are any indication, both the classic Right and religious Right are captive to the Oslo paradigm and the consciousness that produced it.

The recent Annapolis "peace" conference - and President Bush's subsequent visit to the Middle East - shows that where Israel is concerned, there is still nothing new under the sun. Once again, fundamental Israeli rights were shamelessly subordinated to the presumed rights of all others, including even of openly Arab defiant terrorists now conveniently disguised as an "Authority." Once again, it seems, Israel had been called upon to offer land for nothing.

In order to emphasize the magnitude of the Holocaust and genocide, Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology: Polish Academy of Sciences, Professor Henryk Domanski, created the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, on July 2 2003.

It is easy to feel sorry for the Palestinians in Gaza. Televised and print images of their apparently unrelieved misery suggest Israeli cruelty in the creation of shortages and in the use of armed force. Exactly the opposite is true. The moment that flagrantly illegal Hamas rocket attacks upon Israeli noncombatants cease, no harms of any kind will be imposed by Israel.

The Foundation Momentum Iudaicum Lodzense was established on November 6 1995.

From a national survival standpoint, the candidate debates remain pretty much beside the point. Not a single presidential aspirant has answered (or even attempted to answer) a very important question: Are we Americans now involved in a merely tactical struggle against particular terror groups and individuals, or are we, instead, embroiled in something much larger? Should we now be focusing on assorted political, military and logistical issues (the effective position, more or less, of all candidates), or upon the much wider religious and cultural context from which our principal terror enemies are spawned?

I am often asked what Jewish life in Poland is really like.

For Jews, free will must always be oriented toward life, to the blessing, not to the curse. Our binding charge is to strive in this obligatory direction of individual and collective self-preservation by using our intelligence and by exercising our essentially disciplined acts of will. In circumstances where such striving is consciously rejected, the outcome - however catastrophic - can never rise to the dignified level of tragedy.

Over the past 12 years that I have been writing this column I discussed the Ringelblum Archives numerous times.

True life, it seems, can never be brought purposefully before the judgment seat of Reason. Much as we might wish it were otherwise, absurd narratives now best mirror the deteriorating situation of life on earth. Still living an elaborate pantomime of right and wrong, justice and punishment, we humans desperately want the unfolding world-drama to develop with both fairness and sensibility. Generally, we witness something quite different.

It is often said that in places you would least expect, there is certain to be a Beit Chabad.

Notwithstanding all of the alleged "progress" in combating Islamist terrorism, our leaders have yet to really understand the core Jihadist rallying cry. "We love death," the murderers shout ecstatically - and they always shout in chorus, for terrorism is a collective activity - but we seem to think this apparent necrophilia is merely perverse, that operationally it is beside the point. No judgment could be further from the truth. In fact, correctly interpreting this openly lurid affection is ultimately the key to fashioning a genuinely effective strategy of counter-terrorism.

Last week Rabbi Schudrich of Warsaw sent me more pictures from Poland showing the community celebrating Chanukah.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. For anyone who can still think clearly, the Annapolis "Peace Conference" in November was merely the latest hallucinatory rendition of a very troubled sleep. It's not that this carefully scripted assembly actually confirmed a catastrophic outcome for Israel. Rather, it underscored America's perilous and persistent preoccupation with a determinably wrongheaded foreign policy.

When things get bad, I must remember that thousands of people in Israel are doing wonderful mitzvot daily, and we cannot become discouraged.

During my trip to Poland last summer I discovered a few areas that needed attention.

Since Netanyahu, whose own slick administration disingenuously strengthened the hand of Palestinian terrorists, most Israelis have insistently kept up a hollow refrain for Palestinian "autonomy." But the Palestinians know full well the difference between autonomy and sovereignty, and they will have nothing of the former.