InDepth

In this week's Jewish Press front-page essay, Uri Kaufman takes a look at the seemingly unbreakable bond between American Jewry and the Democratic Party. It's something that's been pondered, discussed, debated, and written about for decades, and still the question remains: Why are Jews wedded to the Democrats, years after it stopped making any economic or political sense for them to remain in the marriage?

For Jewish-Americans, the December date that lives in infamy is December 17. For on that day in 1862, Major-General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order 11.

The common wisdom is that CNN's Rick Sanchez was fired because he made anti-Semitic remarks. That's an understandable assumption, but it's also untrue. Sanchez was fired because he attacked a celebrity more liberal and more popular than he is. That he did it with racial overtones made it easy for CNN to pull the plug on him. But his real crime was that he had become an embarrassment, from a liberal perspective, and that's the only perspective in the media that counts.

Intermarriage is without doubt destroying the American Jewish community. There are approximately 5.6 million American Jews, some 2 million of whom live in households identified as non-Jewish. Better than half the Jewish children under the age of 18 are being raised as non-Jews or with no religion. Whereas before 1965 only 10 percent of American Jews who married did so outside the faith, that percentage has jumped over the past two-and-a-half decades to at least 52 percent.

We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews. For the first decades after Israel's founding, this war was conventional in nature. The goal was straightforward: to use military force to overrun Israel. Well before the Berlin Wall came down, that approach had clearly failed.

"John Roy Carlson" was one of several pen names used by the Armenian-American journalist Avedis Boghos Derounian, whose 1943 book Under Cover was a tremendously popular expose of Nazi sympathizers in America in the years leading up to World War II.

Only a selective end to its nuclear ambiguity would allow Israel to exploit the potentially considerable benefits of a Samson Option. Should Israel choose to keep its Bomb in the "basement," therefore, it could not make any use of the Samson Option.

Shomrim, volunteer citizen patrols, established in Jewish communities to handle quality-of-life issues, have been in existence for many years and are credited by local police forces for their key role in reducing crime. Not only are there active Shomrim patrols in Brooklyn's religiously concentrated neighborhoods of Boro Park, Flatbush, Williamsburg and Crown Heights, but also thriving patrols in the Jewish communities of Baltimore, Northwest London and more. While these patrols are designed to monitor suspicious activity and report any potentially dangerous activity to the police, the recent shooting of four Boro Park Shomrim members in September is a chilling reminder of the inherent danger these dedicated volunteers face on a daily basis.

In our quest to be spiritual entities it is incumbent on us to learn Judaism's definition of a spiritual person.

All last week, Rabbi Yehuda Levin's name appeared in the news as the man behind gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino's widely-reported remarks opposing gay marriage and homosexuality. After a maelstrom of criticism, Paladino apologized to the gay and lesbian community, prompting Rabbi Levin to sever his ties with the Republican candidate.

In recent weeks it has become abundantly clear that there is one pathological way in which Israel differs from all other countries. Israel is the only place on earth where large portions of the country's "intelligentsia" think it obscene and "fascist" to expect people seeking citizenship in their country to express loyalty to it.

Everything we experience in life serves as a hands-on lesson concerning our purpose on earth. Consider this: Thirty-three miners plunge into two months of darkness 2,000 feet below the surface, disconnected from their source. After 69 days of eternity, the moment they were praying for arrived. Their dream became a reality. They would finally see the light of day, the joy of freedom, the hug of loved ones, and the tears of their children.

When Yaffa Farjun graduated from the AMIT Florin Taman High School in Tzfat, Israel, in 1994, she never imagined that 15 years later she would return to her old school, to the very same building where she had once studied, not just as a member of the staff, but - at the tender age of 33 - as the school's newly appointed principal. After graduation, Farjun had been keen to discover the world that lay outside of Tzfat and spent over a decade teaching in the center of the country. But following the outbreak of the second Lebanon war, she felt a duty to return to the north and to her native city.

The Israeli policy of an undeclared nuclear capacity will not work indefinitely. Left unrevised, this policy will fail. The most obvious locus of failure would be Iran.

Misinformation and hate are spreading thick at American colleges. We'd like to think that it's not the type of thing that's happening on our very own campuses, but it's certainly occurring.

Sometimes the truth can be found in the oddest of places, if one knows where to look. Even in poll results. A new study by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research bears this out. Released last week, it raises three difficult questions for all those who continue to believe that Israel must make concessions to win peace with the Palestinians.

Sometimes the truth can be found in the oddest of places, if one knows where to look. Even in poll results.

My first visit to Israel in the summer of 1959 coincided to an extent with the trip by Rabbi Aharon Kotler, the great rosh yeshiva of Lakewood, who came to give shiurim at Yeshiva Eitz Chaim in Jerusalem and to campaign for Agudath Israel in the Knesset elections, as he had done previously in the decade.

Even a one- or two-month extension of Israel's ten-month settlement moratorium, senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has announced, won't suffice. Nothing less than a total freeze throughout the duration of Israeli-Palestinian talks would be acceptable.

If one makes his way beyond the outskirts of Kiev and continues deep into the forests of the neighboring village of Radomyshl, he soon enters an unmarked clearing.

Anyone who thinks Prime Minister Netanyahu, in order to improve relations with the U.S., should succumb to American pressure in return for a U.S. incentives package and extend the freeze of Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria is either mistaken or misguided.

Even before his eyes open in the morning, the kollel student has in his head the rapid-fire flow of verses, laws and teachings from the prior day's learning. The words of Modeh Ani exit his lips while he reaches to shut the alarm before it wakes his family. Soon he will be on his way, confronted with many topics of halacha and hashkafa.

Worldwide, it is generally assumed that Israel's nuclear policy of deliberate ambiguity makes good sense. Everyone already knows that Israel has "the Bomb." So, why "stir the pot" by retreating from "opacity?"

Today is a very special day; it is the fourth day of Chol HaMoed Sukkot; it is the first day of the end of the building freeze in our community. Will the freeze end or will the cute trick of the Arabs work? They demanded a 10-month building freeze in Judea and Samaria, and then they waited nine months before they decided to sit down to start negotiations with Israel. When they finally did sit down, the first declaration of the Arabs was that the freeze must continue. The world leaders promptly agreed and declared that it is only right that if the Arabs finally agreed to negotiate, Israel should freeze building in Judea and Samaria. "How could we evil Israelis start building again when the Arabs so graciously agreed to talk to us?"

Joseph Sobran died last week. Regular readers may recall the Monitor devoting a handful of columns over the years to Sobran's malicious commentary on Jews and Israel. He was a supremely talented writer with a prose style smooth as silk, but sometime in the mid-1980's he descended deep into the fever swamps of anti-Semitism and never resurfaced.

Israel is a magical country, but to experience one of its greatest wonders you have to travel out to what the world calls the West Bank and the Bible calls Judea and Samaria.

Of blogs there is no shortage (roughly 130 million, in fact, according to the latest statistics). Good blogs that address contemporary issues relevant to the Orthodox Jewish world, however, are harder to come by. Emes Ve-Emunah - haemtza.blogspot.com - is one such blog.

On Oct. 8, 1973, two days after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban delivered the following address to the UN General Assembly. Of particular interest are the references to Anwar Sadat, whose image had not as yet been transformed into that of a peace-seeking visionary, and to the foresight of Israeli leaders in refusing to relinquish any territory in the absence of a workable and sustainable peace treaty.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires that colleges and universities redress racial and ethnic discrimination or risk losing their federal funding. Thus, if African American or Hispanic students are harassed on campus, they can complain to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is mandated to enforce Title VI and ensure that their schools fix the problem.

Now that we've suffered, yet again, through the annual United Nations circus, has it occurred to anyone (other than New York City police officers) to question why we continue to tolerate the hypocrisy and waste of it all?