Candles On The Carmel

Posted on: April 11th, 2003

''We are three blocks away; you will be home in a minute.''
The taxi driver nudges me rudely into semi-consciousness. I try
to shake the fog from my head. I am still half asleep, staring
through the window at the Christmas lights. As consciousness
slowly seeps through, something here is out of place. Why is there
a giant Christmas tree on display in Budapest when it is months
after Christmas? I shake my head some more. No, it is not
Budapest. I left Budapest six hours ago and have been flying all
night. I must have succumbed to exhaustion on the ride up to
Haifa in the taxi from the airport.

Election Analysis: The Incredible Shrinking Israeli Left

Posted on: March 7th, 2003

There is no sound so delightful as the whimpering of leftists in the morning.

There is no message so hope-inspiring as the screams of outrage from the world and the
accusations that Israelis have voted against "peace."

The Wisest Men of Chelm: A Fable For Our Time

Posted on: February 7th, 2003

In the back country south of Warsaw, there
stood a small shtetl, a little Jewish village,
named Chelm. Renowned across the Pale, the
villagers of Chelm were famous for their sharp
wits, their inventive brains, and their capacity
for resolving difficult problems.

No Holds Barred: A Frank Conversation With Steven Plaut

Posted on: January 30th, 2003

Erudite and outspoken, Steven Plaut is a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press whose essays, many of which have appeared in this front-page space, always generate enthusiastic reader feedback.

Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee

Posted on: January 17th, 2003

Consider a country in which the minister of
justice prepares an official ''speech code'' that
delineates the boundaries of permissible
speech, and where violators may be sent to
prison.

American Jewry's Outdated Orthodoxy

Posted on: December 20th, 2002

Most American Jews are orthodox. No, that's not a misprint, nor is it a sign that I've taken leave of my senses. In fact, the bulk of American Jewry is very orthodox. The problem is, they're very orthodox in their liberalism, not their Judaism -- and therein lies the answer to all the costly studies, surveys and polls commissioned by Jewish organizations in their never-ending quest to understand why Jews are assimilating themselves out of existence.

Zionism Without Judaism (Part II)

Posted on: November 29th, 2002

The most fundamental question for this new Post-Oslo era is this: How could Israel have allowed itself to pursue the ''peace process'' in the first place? The answers are very likely to raise serious doubts about the nature of secular Zionism itself and its alleged success in resolving the modernity dilemma of the Jews.

Zion Without Judaism

Posted on: November 22nd, 2002

While there is of course more than one way to look at the last two centuries of Jewish life on the planet, one instructive way to summarize them might be as a two-hundred year search for an alternative to traditional Orthodoxy.

State Of The Jewish Union 5763

Posted on: November 8th, 2002

We recently marked the start of a new year on the Jewish calendar, as good a time as any to sum up where things now stand.

Phil Donahue: American Pestilence

Posted on: October 4th, 2002

The good news is that the ratings for Phil Donahue's new MSNBC talk show are nearly invisible; the bad news is that MSNBC gave this raving anti-American, pro-Palestinian leftist a platform in the first place, reconfiguring its entire nighttime lineup around him and terminating the program hosted by the pro-Israel Alan Keyes in the process.