Op-Eds

With so much recent debate in Israel about academic freedom, I thought it would be constructive to describe the current politically correct ideas about academic freedom held and proliferated by the academic left:

"Officer, what's your badge number?" I've been asked that question countless times over the last 26 years. Almost always, it followed an unpopular decision. Always, it was accompanied by an unspoken message: "I'm letting you know I will hold you accountable for this decision." And always, I answer that question in a direct, simple way: I give my badge number.

"Ani l'dodi v'dodi li (I am my Beloved's and my Beloved is mine)" - Song of Songs 6:3). This is the acronym of Elul. Since Elul is the last month of the year and immediately precedes Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Judgment for all the world's inhabitants, it was established as a time for teshuvah/repentance. We therefore recite selichos and penitential prayers to [Hashem]. [Book of Our Heritage]

If I am granted the years and strength, in three years (and during my eightieth year) I will conduct another census of Jewish day schools in the United States, following up on my previous research conducted at five-year intervals.

The Claims Conference (as reported in last week's Jewish Press) discovered a fraud perpetrated against the organization. In a sophisticated criminal scheme, falsified and phony documents were submitted to programs that make payments to Jewish victims of Nazism. These programs, funded by the German government, have been targeted by persons seeking to extract payments to which they were not entitled.

The federal government just announced that the nation's unemployment rate is still hovering around 10 percent. Voters have seized on this news by demanding that their leaders find a way to drive that number down.

A little more than seven years ago, on June 11, 2003, an 18-year-old Palestinian, Abdel Mahdi Shabneh, cradled a Kalashnikov and proclaimed violence to be the only means by which his people could combat Israeli occupation. Shabneh's target would be Jerusalem's busiest street, at the busiest time - Jaffa Road at 5 p.m.

Since the 1960s, Our Way, a program of the Orthodox Union, has been establishing initiatives on behalf of Jewish deaf throughout North America. Participants...

J Street, the leftist lobbying organization that claims to be pro-Israel, is running a television ad that divides the world into two groups: the good guys who support the two-state solution, the end of the occupation and peace; and the bad guys who oppose these results and instead favor a continuation of violence.

Islam, which has been described as an ideology wrapped in a religion, will never allow its adherents to accept a non-Muslim state in land previously conquered in the name of Allah.

There is a country in the Middle East accused of conducting a brutal decades-long occupation. A country where a blockade causes starvation among a civilian refugee population. A country that violently cracks down on all opposition and shoots into crowds of protestors but receives substantial financial aid from the United States as an ally in the War on Terror even as it undermines our war efforts by pursuing its own agenda.

I've been reading Newsweek since 1975, when, as a yeshiva student in Israel, I subscribed in order to keep abreast of world events when otherwise not ensconced in the study of Torah. It's been three and a half decades, and my subscription, which lapses next month, will not be renewed. The reasons are reflective of the current state of American culture and mainstream journalism.

Up in the Catskills, a man named Yossi Zablocki is trying to save the last blintz palace of my generation's youth. The place is called Kutsher's Country Club. The man who made it all work was Milton Kutsher.

If there is one thing the overwhelming majority of Jews agree on, it's that we are friends of Israel. We know Israel is in peril and we want to do something to help.

Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, died recently. The other day I saw a clip of him singing "Amazing Grace." The sincerity in his voice was unmistakable. And why not? That hymn is his only saving grace. For Byrd found his faith in the Baptist church, which teaches that all sin can be washed away "in the blood of Christ." It is divine grace and not good works that rights the wrongs perpetrated against one's fellow human beings.

A front-page story in The New York Timesof July 10 reported that federal immigration authorities in the Obama administration have adopted a "new strategy" to replace the military-style raids that were conducted in the Bush years to find and arrest illegal aliens.

Volunteer workers picking grapes and pruning vines in Bordeaux would hardly expect the world to take notice. But when 130 volunteers (Christian evangelicals, no less) come to Har Bracha, a settlement in Samaria, to help out in its winery, it became worthy of attention - indeed, extraordinary preoccupation - from The New York Times.

How did we survive? Can you imagine that day? The First Temple: never had there been a more perfect society. An entire people dedicated to the service of God. Dignitaries from the four corners of the world came to witness the glory of the Kingdom of David and the shining Temple on the Hills of Yerushalayim.

An official Iranian delegation from the city of Shiraz recently visited Weimar, its sister city in Germany. Like Weimar, Shiraz has been a capital of high culture for centuries, and appreciating the arts undoubtedly was high on the itinerary of Mayor Mehran E'temadi and his fellow delegates.

Famagusta, Cyprus: The ghost town lies near the very center of the city, just outside the Venetian walls. It is home only to snakes, scorpions, and rats of a hundred varieties. Signs on the fences around the ghost town show armed Turkish soldiers threatening those taking photographs with arrest or worse. The crumbling buildings inside the perimeter are frozen in time in 1974, as if in an episode of "The Twilight Zone."

While Shylock, in Shakespeare's play, might have used the plural as a rhetorical device, his words speak to a greater truth about community and nation. When we look at a country and wonder why it behaves in the way it does - with charity, belligerence, etc. - we are seeing an entity functioning as an individual might, often driven by the same emotions, ethics and sense of justice.

We need to learn from history. Once upon a time (nearly forty years but not so long ago, really) American foreign policy was being stymied, on every issue and continent, by a duplicitous Soviet Union, Confounded by the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon and his foreign policy czar, Henry Kissinger, faced not so much crises that threatened America as murky messes that wouldn't yield to unilateral resolution. Soviet partnership was needed but at best absent.

The early morning air drifting off the port of Haifa passed through the tents housing the sleeping new recruits secretly based at Kibbutz Ein Shofat.

It is now five years since the mass expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif. The anniversary falls on Tisha B'Av, when we mourn the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem. We also mark the modern-day destruction of Jewish life.

Rabbi David Nesenoff has given Accuracy in Media the most detailed account yet of how his encounter with veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas caused him to reevaluate not only his view of the media, but of the White House and President Obama.

Iris Twito, the mother of two sons injured by Kassam rockets in the city of Sderot, granted an exclusive interview with Sderot Media Center following the Gaza aid flotilla fiasco.

As an Israeli psychoanalyst once noted with bitter irony, the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. The corollary to this observation is that Europeans will never forgive the Israelis and the Jews for Auschwitz.

The ongoing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico has been declared the worst oil spill in American history. It occurred when an offshore drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing eleven crew members and causing an oil pipe, 5,000 feet below the ocean's surface, to rupture. BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, is the fourth largest company, of any type, in the world. Shockingly, BP's efforts, backed by America, have not stopped the flow.

The unusually severe sentence of 27 years in prison for Sholom Rubashkin is a victory for a prosecution that from the outset pursued a win-at-all-costs strategy. But the success comes at a price, and not just to the 51-year-old man now facing a virtual life sentence, his wife and 10 children. The government's handling of this case has sullied our justice system.

Anti-Semitism is the planet's oldest hatred. Yet it is a prejudice I had thought the world was moving past. Clearly, however, as demonstrated by the endless vitriol directed at Israel, it is alive and well.