InDepth

Modern civilization has a terrible momentum, a frighteningly breathless rhythm that prods us all to forget what is genuinely important. "The end of all this delirium," wrote the philosopher Jacques Maritain, "is to prevent man from remembering G-d." An important new book by Israeli thinker Asher Keren, "A Time For Change," reflects similar concerns.

The Monitor frequently has made men tion of the website Timeswatch.org, which methodically lays out, weekday after weekday, the lies, distortions, bias and convenient "mistakes" that seem to grace every issue of The New York Times, the one-time paper of record that now features as much opinion-laced journalism as one might find in any given edition of nakedly partisan publications such as The New Republic or The Weekly Standard.

Despite well-founded optimism, the Democrats still have a problem. They know their candidate will win the Jewish vote.

We find that for the commemoration of the churban - the destruction of the temples and the exile - we have three weeks of mourning in degrees. But we have seven weeks for comfort.

When you're confronted with leftist and radical bias day-in and day-out, you're forced to either recede into the background or stand up for your values.

Only after another year, after hundreds more Israelis were murdered, and after 3,000 Americans were murdered on 9/11, did the Jewish establishment organize a rally, in Washington on April 15, 2002.

"The mass," said the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in 1930, "crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select." Today, in deference to the Many, the intellectually and culturally unambitious mass not only celebrates the commonplace (which it has been taught to do), it openly proclaims and spreads our American epoch of engineered mediocrity as an enviable form of democracy.

Federation Follies It was nice, in an ironic way, to read Arlene Peck's op-ed column "Not One More Dime For Federation," Aug. 20).Just three...

A tale of two books and how the media control what you know and whether you know. A tale of two books one harshly critical of President Bush the other highly unflattering to Sen. Hillary Clinton. A tale of two books the first of which rode a wave of media hype to bestsellerdom the second of which was all but ignored.

"Although they did not have gemara as a separate subject, while studying biblical commentaries the women learned large portions of the Oral Torah."

"A radical rightist is one whose concern for his children and his neighbors - for Jews in general - is denounced as racial discrimination.

Unlike most high school trips that feature the hottest tourist spots, ours involved meeting and speaking with journalists, political leaders and government spokespeople.

Given the world's diabolic double standards, Israeli soldiers stand accused of atrocities (which they did not commit) while the ethnic Arab Muslim Janjaweed paramilitary troops in Sudan and the Arab and Palestinian terrorists remain uncondemned.

Ravaged by excess - of consumption and commodities rather than of understanding - America now lives anxiously in crowds. This is naturally pleasing to politicians of all persuasions, for whom herding the people together where they cannot think is always "good."

Gush Katif is the name of the set of Jewish settlements at the western end of the Gaza Strip.

Special Thanks To HatzolahWe wish to thank all of the members of Hatzolah who helped rescue my son and his two passengers from his...

The e-mail arrived a couple weeks ago from a Bush-hater barely able to contain his glee. According to this fellow's opening line, the president had once again shown himself to be a boob beyond compare, as evidenced by the following "news item" my correspondent helpfully attached:

The funding of this country's Federation network as well as how and where the money is spent cries out for investigation and accountability.

The precise details of that withdrawal are always subject to negotiation, but everyone agrees that the basis for any real chance of 'peace' is for Israel to withdraw.

How can two such delicious souls who -- in King David's famous expression -- were beloved and sweet in their lives and in their deaths have not parted be robbed from us so brutally?