Posted on: June 6th, 2007

In the last lap of his second term, George W. Bush has all but fallen off the major media scope. It’s not that he’s suddenly become beloved by The New York Times or that media pundits have now begun to see the light and embrace him. On the contrary, criticism of the president and his policies has become almost second nature to most of them.

Posted on: June 6th, 2007

It was shocking to see the writer Hillel Halkin marking the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem by calling for its division. In a May 15op-ed in the New York Sun (“Mounting Figures”), Halkin wrote about the concern of Israeli political leaders with demographics. As a solution, he extended their call for territorial concessions even beyond Judea and Samaria, applying it to the capital city of Israel.

Posted on: June 6th, 2007

One of the many new “minhagim” in the shidduch world concerns two or more siblings who are in the proverbial parsha simultaneously. This is an increasingly frequent phenomenon due to the ever-increasing length of the average dating career.

Posted on: June 6th, 2007

Devious ideologues hate light because light exposes their loathsome tricks. So it is not surprising that Letty Cottin Pogrebin and her cohort, incisively critiqued by Dr. Kenneth Levin in a recent Jewish Press front-page essay (“The Empty Rage of Jewish ‘Progressives,’” April 20), hate seeing the word “progressives” in quotation marks.

Posted on: May 30th, 2007

Great wars in history eventually become great wars about history. Only a few years after the last soldier leaves the battlefield, accepted truths about the nature of a military conflict and the motivations for it invariably come under assault by revisionists and counter-revisionists whose vehemence can rival that of the original combatants.

Posted on: May 30th, 2007

Covered with sand and dust, his face the color of chalk, my husband resembled a nomad, shirt ripped, clothes and shoes much the same as one who just crossed a desert. Choked with emotion, he could barely speak when he returned late Thursday afternoon, the fourth day of the Six-Day War, from his first experience at the newly liberated Western Wall.

Posted on: May 30th, 2007

The Twentieth of Sivan, designated by sages in two different eras to be a day of fasting and commemoration, marks tragedies that befell the Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages up to the Holocaust and was, until the Second World War, communally observed by European Jewry.

Posted on: May 22nd, 2007

Why did Bahar’s remarks go largely unreported in the Western media? Why does the U.S. continue to deal with, support, fund and urge concessions to the PA when its elected officials call for genocide of Jews and Americans? Why are foreign governments not protesting or demanding a retraction from PA president Mahmoud Abbas?

Posted on: May 22nd, 2007

Sadly, the war in Iraq appears to be lost. The Democrats – like terriers shaking a rat (Iraq), using a plan of funding war for three months (salami tactics), causing the Army command to recognize that Congress, not the president, is effectively in charge – have achieved their goal: implementing withdrawal.

Posted on: May 22nd, 2007

In an unprecedented effort to rally popular support, al Qaeda is apparently trying to refashion its image from an ultra-conservative, radical Islamist group with clear and precise goals – the ultimate being to implement sharia law around the globe – to what the liberal West has long had a soft spot for: a romanticized revolutionary movement of the “Ché” variety, fighting to overthrow oppression and exploitation (which, as the usual story goes, are products of U.S. greed and aggression).

Posted on: May 19th, 2007

In 1984, the United States rectified a diplomatic anomaly when it formally recognized the Vatican and agreed to exchange ambassadors with the papal mini-state in Rome.

Posted on: May 16th, 2007

It is in the silent whispers of our daily Hebrew prayers. “May it be thy will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, that the Temple be speedily rebuilt in our days and grant us a share in thy Torah. There we will serve thee with reverence, as in days of old and as in former years.”

Posted on: May 16th, 2007

Is it just me, or have you also noticed how our children are introduced to an unusually high degree of competition in school? Every time I turn around it seems they are involved in one or another extracurricular program.

Posted on: May 16th, 2007

In the winter of 1943, a decision made by a few idealistic and brave pioneers impacted the very future of Israel. In Kfar Pines, members of the religious Zionist youth movement Bnei Akiva mulled over a recommendation by the Jewish Agency that they resettle Kfar Etzion, an abandoned kibbutz located about two miles east of the Jerusalem-Hebron road. They all understood that the task at hand was immense – the area was isolated and heavily populated by Arabs – but they courageously decided to accept the challenge.

Posted on: May 16th, 2007

It isn’t just about Israel. American Jews, whether politically liberal or conservative, can, should, and do work together with Evangelical Christians. Headlines and stereotypes tend to hype the issues where a majority of (liberal) Jews are at odds with a majority of (conservative) Evangelicals – abortion and gay rights quickly come to mind. But there are many issues, and the list is growing, on which Jews and Evangelicals are working toward common goals.

Posted on: May 16th, 2007

When a people is under siege it matters more, not less, how the besieged treat each other. Perhaps I am wrong, or only partly right, but it seems as though too many Jews are treating each other in a manner that is hardly loving, ethical or even minimally civil.

Posted on: May 9th, 2007

As a matter of principle, it is not the business of American friends of Israel to tell Israelis who should, or should not, be their prime minister. That is, unfortunately, a proposition that has been observed largely in the breach over the course of the last 30 years.

Posted on: May 9th, 2007

When my grandfather left Poland in 1930, he refused to speak Polish again. Perhaps he foresaw what many would not. When he learned of the Shoah, he discovered that his remaining family members were among those whose lives were snuffed out by their European neighbors.

Posted on: May 9th, 2007

Amos Oz never tires of finding ways to blame Israel for the absence of Arab-Israeli peace, no matter how clearly the voices on the other side, in Palestinian and broader Arab media, mosques, and schools, declare that their idea of peace is the annihilation of Israel and the destruction of its people. Nor does the celebrated Israeli novelist tire of grossly rewriting history to serve his blame-Israel narrative.

Posted on: May 9th, 2007

With the release of the Winograd Commission report, the question whether Prime Minister Olmert will resign has dominated Israeli news. A large rally of his opponents took place in Tel Aviv demanding that he accept the report’s critique of his conduct of last summer’s Lebanon war and step down. Some ideological leaders from both the Left and the Right did not participate in the demonstration – the rightists arguing that the organizers of the rally were not against Olmert’s ideology, the leftists fearing his successor would not share theirs.