Posted on: November 2nd, 2011

On the first day of this past Rosh Hashanah, I visited Milwaukee while my wife, Layala, traveled back to the shul of her youth in Brooklyn. When we met up later in the day for Yom Tov lunch at our Harrisburg, Pennsylvania home, we had a number of experiences to share with each other.

Posted on: November 2nd, 2011

The Middle East is ablaze with political revolution. Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria – the list of countries keeps growing. All is quiet, however, on the Israeli front. The question is: Why?

Posted on: October 26th, 2011

With Sgt. Gilad Shalit safely returned in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian terrorists and murderers, celebration – propelled by wishful avoidance – spread throughout Israel.

Posted on: October 26th, 2011

I’ve been reading The New York Times pretty much every single day since I was ten years old. That’s more than a half-century by now.

Posted on: October 26th, 2011

In the 1980s, I was an unrefined adolescent from blue-collar Butler, Pennsylvania. I knew nothing and cared nothing about politics. I had no idea if I was a conservative or a liberal, Democrat or Republican, or much of anything else.

Posted on: October 26th, 2011

Information spreads like wildfire. “Gilad Shalit is home,” my friend e-mailed me happily as soon as he heard the news. He isn’t Jewish or a even a Zionist, but the kidnapping of someone our age moved him enough to track the case.

Posted on: October 18th, 2011

I have three grandsons serving in the Israel Defense Forces. If any one of them were, God forbid, captured, I would demand that every Arab murderer be set free so that my grandson would come home alive and well. I would demonstrate, argue, demand, organize marches, cry, fight, and scream that my grandson be freed.

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Posted on: October 18th, 2011

It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the Bus 300 affair recently popped up again in the Israeli media just days after the al-Qaeda terrorist with the U.S. passport, Anwar al-Awlaki, was liquidated by a drone in Yemen, and shortly before the Netanyahu government agreed to release more than a thousand terrorists for the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Posted on: October 18th, 2011

In recent times we have witnessed increasing support for Israel on the part of evangelical Christians. They view the establishment of the State of Israel as the miraculous fulfillment of the vision of the biblical prophets.

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Posted on: October 18th, 2011

The recent call by NYU's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for TIAA-CREF to divest holdings in targeted companies doing business in Israel is part of a troubling trend that exposes dangerous radicalism on campuses disguised as efforts at achieving social justice.

Posted on: October 18th, 2011

The German Holocaust foundation Remembrance, Responsibility, Future - EVZ - is in a state of denial concerning misuse of public funds meant to largely compensate the victims of the Shoah but used instead to finance anti-Semitic student exchange programs in Israel and Germany.

Posted on: October 12th, 2011

"What a depressing book!" is a common response to reading Sefer Kohelet. It seems at first glance that Shlomo HaMelech, the wisest of all men, is telling us there is no purpose to all of man's efforts, whether intellectual, material or social.

Posted on: October 12th, 2011

The use of double standards against Israel has permeated large parts of the world's mainstream. One finds it at the United Nations, among governments, in major media, academic institutions, NGOs, liberal churches and trade unions.

Posted on: October 12th, 2011

I read Nicholas D. Kristof's New York Times column of October 6 with its headline "Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?" and concluded on finishing it that it is Kristof who is truly an enemy of Israel.

Posted on: October 12th, 2011

In May 1967 Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook spoke to his former Mercaz HaRav students at their annual Independence Day reunion in Jerusalem. Usually a festive day of celebration, this year was different. Rabbi Kook sorrowfully recalled his feeling of despair nineteen years earlier, when the State of Israel was born: "I was torn to pieces. I could not celebrate." Suddenly he cried out: "They have divided my land. Where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it? And where is our Shechem? And our Jericho - will we forget them?"

Posted on: October 5th, 2011

Will the Jewish vote, normally overwhelmingly Democratic, be up for grabs in 2012? That question became a subject of intense debate when a Republican was elected recently to the House of Representatives from New York's 9th Congressional District for the first time in 90 years.

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Posted on: October 5th, 2011

In June, Israel's police commissioner, Yochanon Danino, announced the dissolution of Sa'ar, a unit that specializes in cases dealing with the exploitation of foreign workers and refugees along with other issues related to migration and human trafficking.

Posted on: October 5th, 2011

Yom Kippur is the most solemn day of the Jewish year and it is also the strangest - because it seems to negate all that makes us human.

Posted on: October 5th, 2011

The Jewish debt to the Turks goes back centuries, to when the Ottomans took in thousands of Jewish refugees after the Spanish and Portuguese expulsions of 1492 and 1497. Moreover, when Israel was shunned for decades by nearly every Muslim country, it was Turkey that was Israel's military ally and commercial trading partner.

Posted on: September 27th, 2011

If Palestinian leaders indoctrinate their people to pursue genocide and TheNew York Times doesn't report it, is the indoctrination nevertheless of consequence?