InDepth

I've read suggestions by newspaper columnists and observers that events have overtaken Israel, that Israel is "isolating itself" in the Middle East. That view is wrong, and always has been wrong. Israel is not isolating itself - Israel is leading in the Middle East. Israel does not stand alone - Israel stands above as the one true beacon of freedom and opportunity in the Middle East.

According to the Talmud (Sanhedrin 97), Mashiach will arrive before the Jewish year 6000. This means the full range of spectacular prophecies and supernatural events associated with the End of Days must occur within the next 228 years.

President Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust is a serious issue that merits careful consideration of the historical facts. Listing FDR's Jewish acquaintances, or the number of Jews hired by his administration, tells us very little about his response to the Nazi genocide. A meaningful discussion of the issues needs to move beyond arguments along the lines of "some of his best friends were Jewish." And name-calling likewise does little to enhance understanding of the issues.

Dr. Rafael Medoff's articles contain half-truths, distortions and reflect out-and-out hatred for FDR ("Could Europe's Jews Have Been Rescued?" front page essay, Sept. 9; "While Six Million Lived," front page essay, Sept. 16).

“Overnight,” The New York Times reported, Vienna’s Jews “were made free game for mobs, despoiled of their property, deprived of police protection, ejected from employment and barred from sources of relief.”

Sometimes, as I have asserted from time to time in this column, seeing requires distance. Now, suffocating daily in political and economic rants from both the Right and the Left, we Americans must promptly confront a critical need to look beyond the historical moment, to seek both meaning and truth behind the news. There, suitably distant from the endlessly adrenalized jumble of current fears and concerns, we could finally understand the timeless struggle of individual against mass, of the singular person against the "crowd."

An international non-Jewish pro-Israel organization has declared: The UN must "reject any resolutions and actions that would violate Israel's legitimate sovereignty over all of Jerusalem."

The onslaught against the Jewish state has begun.In just the past few weeks, Turkey expelled Israel's ambassador, an Egyptian mob stormed the Israeli embassy in Cairo and ransacked the premises, and the Palestinians reaffirmed their insistence on seeking UN approval for a unilateral declaration of statehood.

One of the most bizarre controversies concerning freedom of the press and freedom of speech has been afflicting Israel in recent days. The basic question is whether there exists some sort of natural right to advocate the mass murder of Jews.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman thinks Republicans are knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. In the not-too-distant future he sees a Republican half-wit winning the presidency and dragging America back to the Stone Age.

Commemorating a national tragedy requires integrity. Memorial Day is not observed with proclamations of pacifism, nor should it be. December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, is properly remembered as the day that will "live in infamy," not as a plea for international sensitivity.

When I moved onto the block not too many years ago, neighbors welcomed me. One brought over a cake, another came to visit Friday night, everyone was friendly and smiled, said hello on the street and chatted amiably when the kids would play outside.

The president held 82 press conferences in 1933 alone. The subject of Hitler's persecution of the Jews came up on only one occasion – and not because Roosevelt raised it.

Declaring Palestine. It is a core issue for Israel that has come up in my columns before. But now, the enemy's operational tactics have been changed and fine-tuned. This month, Palestinian Authority leaders will seek formal creation of their independent state via the "good offices" of the United Nations.

As we mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, it would be instructive to look back at the early reactions to the atrocity on the part of some prominent leftists. It's become something of a mantra on the left that the whole world initially sympathized with the U.S., and that America's image was so irredeemably tarnished only after the evil warmonger George W. Bush trashed the Constitution and sent the American military off to slaughter innocent Muslims in the interests of Halliburton and other capitalist behemoths.

Benny Morris was one of the original, and in some ways the most destructive, of Israel's " New Historians" - Jewish academics who seek to revise history to make it jibe with Arab propaganda.

I am a businessman who has raised my family and lived my whole life in the Ninth Congressional District. I am not a professional politician, and I don't intend to become one. I don't use slogans, catch phrases or smoke and mirrors.

Living in New York is getting tougher and tougher. No matter how carefully some of us planned, much of our retirement savings and investments have been dwindling away. Additionally, many of my neighbors are scared that the benefits they have paid into for years - Social Security and Medicare - may be taken away.

When unthinkable disaster struck a decade ago and close to 3,000 people were murdered at the World Trade Center, the scale of destruction created a unique challenge for victims' families: identification of the dead.

Where children are emotionally and socially when they are not in school is a matter of growing concern for educators, especially in Jewish schools and other religious institutions.

For Israel, the prime inheritor of Genesis, an expanding global chaos portends a very unusual, and also ironic, kind of fragility. A relentlessly beleaguered microstate, and always the individual Jew writ large, Israel could become the principal victim of international disorder. In view of the exceptionally far-reaching interrelatedness of all world politics, this could be true even if the actual precipitating events of war and terror would occur elsewhere.

Full gas in neutral. With nearly built-in enmity on the part of the U.S. to the most basic Israeli positions regarding Jerusalem, it is no wonder our efforts to keep Jerusalem continue to run up against so many obstacles.

Israeli radical leftists have long had an intense hatred for American conservatives, who are almost all pro-Israel. Actually, Israeli leftists hate American conservatives precisely because conservatives are pro-Israel.

American Jews are known for the emphasis they place on academic success. Jewish professors populate America's universities, and, respectively, Jewish doctors, lawyers and politicians help fill the nation's hospitals, law firms and legislatures. At the core of this success are generations of American Jewish parents who have encouraged their children to focus, work hard and succeed from kindergarten through college and graduate school.

Later this month the United Nations General Assembly is likely to recognize the state of Palestine (which the United States is expected to veto in the Security Council). This diplomatic charade will ignore long forgotten, but far more consequential, international decisions.

Continuing turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa signals important and potentially catastrophic transformations. For Israel, the greatest danger stems from the interpenetrating and largely unpredictable effects of war, terrorism and revolution in the region. In essence, these plainly destabilizing effects could spawn an unprecedented and historically unique kind of chaos.

“You who cling to Hashem, your God, are all alive today.”

If you're a conservative who's tired of the increasingly cartoonish yawping coming from the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Savages of talk radio, you might want to check out Michael Medved's nationally syndicated program (heard in the New York area on WNYM 970 from 3-5 p.m. weekdays and 3-6 a.m. Sundays).

The eminent law professor Robert Bork once described the Israeli Supreme Court as the worst in the Western world. Israel, Bork wrote, "has set a standard for judicial imperialism that can probably never be surpassed, and, one devoutly hopes, will never be equaled elsewhere."

Two decades after the Crown Heights riots of August 19-21, 1991, the focus in much of the reporting on the anniversary of the violence centered on the importance of healing racial tensions, with the clear implication that the rioting was the culmination of long-simmering tensions between the black and Jewish communities.