InDepth

In the Middle East, secular movements are more poorly funded and more naïve about how to operate politically than the Islamists.

Connecticut has some of the tightest restrictions in the country and Mrs. Lanza was in full compliance with them.

Yet the one thing I have always known, amid the hills and valleys of life: whether or not you succeed in your public endeavors, you cannot fail at your private commitments.

Jews have an obligation to fight laws that would ban their access to guns.

Seeing Israeli soldiers run from marauding, rioting Arabs is a disgrace.

When Abbas says that a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 lines would lead to a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East, he is ignoring the fact that a large number of Palestinians think otherwise.

Sixty-four years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea.

The Obama Administration was using a barely disguised channel to pay for a revolutionary Islamist movement seeking to take over Syria.

What is lost in the discussion are the Biblical underpinnings of abortion and how this is not primarily a legal issue but a religious one.

Can American traditionalists quadruple their numbers in 40 years?

I write this column with my bags packed. I’m lighting four candles in Israel and my fifth I will light Wednesday evening at about 9 p.m. in the lobby of the Avenue Plaza Hotel in Boro Park. I’ll have my guitar in hand, and everyone is invited.

Sinem Tezyapar says, "Let us adopt a language of peace, a language of love. This is easy! And there is no other way."

Sometimes, in complex military calculations, truth is counter-intuitive. In essence, the persuasiveness of Israel's nuclear deterrent vis-à-vis Iran will require prospective enemy perceptions of retaliatory destructiveness at both the low and high ends of the nuclear yield spectrum. Ending nuclear ambiguity at the optimal time could best allow Israel to foster precisely such needed perceptions. This point is very important and possibly overriding.

The main junction from which the different opinions on most issues in Israel diverge is the question of identity. Israel does not have clear borders because it does not have a clear identity. The dispute is not really over peace or security. The dispute is about identity. The more solid our Jewish identity, the stronger the connection between our land and us. The stronger the desire to retreat from our Jewish identity, the stronger our desire to retreat from the land. When we connect to our identity, we will connect to our land and we will merit clear borders and peace.

International opinion has it that the new planned Israeli neighborhood between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim will prevent the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state. Unfortunately, though, that is not true.

A writer of non-fiction for the general community has to know the topic well; a writer for the observant Jewish community has an additional requirement – to understand that Jewish law, halacha, informs our decisions and actions.

The Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin was fond of the phrase “one step forward, two steps back.” In the current Middle East, we have taken many more than two steps backward – and we are repeating patterns that are more than five decades old.

The conventional wisdom about the Israeli government’s decision to allow new building projects in Jerusalem in the E1 area between the city and the Ma’ale Adumim suburb is that it was a blunder.

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What happens, then, if the regime doesn’t give in and the army doesn’t stop the demonstrations?

The Jewish Press joins Klal Yisrael in mourning the death, at age 79, of Rabbi Mendel Weinbach, a founder of Yeshiva Ohr Someach, a leading educational institution in the ba’al teshuvah movement.

Early this week it appeared the end could well be in sight to the ordeal of Jacob Ostreicher, an Orthodox Jewish businessman from Brooklyn jailed in Bolivia without being charged for a year and a half on suspicion of money laundering.

The Hamas bluster about having bested Israel in Operation Pillar of Defense should not be dismissed as typical Arab hyperbole.

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Ehud Barak may or may not be out of Israeli politics for good, but his recent resignation announcement reminded the Monitor of just how much the man had been willing to give up to Yasir Arafat at the tail end of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Hannah and her seven sons; Judith and the Greek commander she beheaded; the outnumbered but fearless Maccabees; the Jews who refused to give in to the decrees of the wicked Antiochus – Chanukah is a time for recounting historic deeds of self-sacrifice in the name of the God of Israel. The most recent one occurred in Israel on Dec. 1, a Shabbat.

It is striking to see that within the EU there is but one country courageous enough to stand with Israel: the Czech Republic.

Whatever the state of world affairs or shift in political winds, one thing remains a constant in our lives: the quest for shidduchim. There is no family or individual among us who does not know at any given time of someone in search of his or her destined life partner; yet too often the hunt is fraught with complexities and accompanied by sleepless nights and a furrowed brow.

Israel has become the paradise of Arab intelligence analysts.

At least we can probably count on the Muslims Brotherhood to refrain from making bunny-snuff videos.