InDepth

This week we read in the parshah about a tzaddik who changed the world forever. Yes, one man can change the world. What kind of man? A man who understands so strongly that God is real that he is not afraid of anyone or anything. He is not afraid to proclaim God’s Name and talk about His greatness. As King David says (Psalm 116), “How can I repay God for all His kindness to me? I will raise the cup of salvations and invoke the Name of God. My vows to God I will pay in the presence…of His entire people….”

The death of polymath Amos Kenan and recent Canaanite archeological finds at Beit Shemesh remind us once again of the obscure movement known as Canaanism, founded by a handful of right-wing Hebrew resistance fighters who decades later would become fountainheads of radical post-Zionism.

At 94, Dr. Bernard Lander, Touro College's founder and president for 39 years, is finally ready to pass on the leadership mantle.

In the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel’s military strategy and tactics displayed some notable strengths, but also some considerable weaknesses. Of course, in the years ahead, Israel is apt to find itself confronted with a far greater threat of belligerency. This is the unrelieved prospect of a nuclear Iran – a possibly irremediable enemy state, and one with well-established ties both to Hezbollah and to an already nuclear North Korea. It follows, at every level of possible threat confrontation, that Israel’s military doctrine will now need to be informed by an improved and appropriately expanded body of pertinent understanding. This, in turn, will require a more refined and updated intellectual orientation to national strategic studies.

Fall arrived late this year in Budapest, where I am visiting from Israel, and it is still very warm on Yom Kippur. The largest Orthodox Yom Kippur services in the city are being held in a downtown hotel. A plaque marking what had been the offices of controversial Judenrat leader Rudolf Kastner is on a building just a few steps away.

Recent Palestinian riots in Jerusalem’s Old City, combined with Palestinian claims that Israel is trying to “Judaize” Jerusalem, are part of a coordinated effort to deny Israel its long-held claim to the city as its eternal and undivided capital.

The loyalty of most American Jews to the Democratic Party and its current leader, President Barack Obama, is not in question. Yet while the ideology of the majority of their members and contributors is no secret, most major Jewish organizations, not to mention synagogues, attempt to stay out of partisan controversies, even while often espousing liberal causes.

I watched in horror, shock and disgust along with much of America as the likes of Libyan President Muammar Khaddafi and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad descended on New York to spread their anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-American vitriol throughout the halls of the UN and on our news talk shows.

When Columbia University granted tenure to Associate Professor Joseph Massad, the school turned its back on the Jewish community.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent passionate address to the United Nations was very powerful and long overdue. Netanyahu’s words came the day after Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s most recent senseless anti-Semitic rant, in which he once again dusted off the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to accuse the Jews of holding the international community within its nefarious clutches, while also recalling the infamous 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism.

October 23 is a date the Monitor will always remember, and so should you. It was on that day in 1995 that Mayor Rudy Giuliani threw Yasir Arafat out of a UN event – and in so doing brought down upon himself the opprobrium of the Clinton administration, New York’s political elite, and not a few feckless Jewish “leaders.”

Following his early June speech delivered in Cairo, U.S. President Obama pretty much gave the final green light to Tehran. More precisely, with regard to ongoing Iranian nuclearization, the president signaled plainly that further economic sanctions, and not any defensive military action, were the only remaining option. In Jerusalem, one must presume, Prime Minister Netanyahu understood immediately the substantially changing drift of American foreign policy toward the Middle East. For Israel, therefore, a new plan for dealing with an unprecedented strategic menace would now be necessary. This plan would somehow have to be based on "living with Iran."

For a nation that swore an undying oath of loyalty to Jerusalem more than two millennia ago, we Jews sure have a funny way of showing it.

Last week, in return for a video – not the freedom of a kidnap victim, but a video of a kidnap victim – Israel freed 20 Palestinian prisoners. This has to stop.

St. Louis University is the latest institution of higher learning to demonstrate that free speech on campuses begins and ends according to how well that speech conforms to existing political orthodoxies.

One of four Courage in Journalism awards to be presented later this month by Christiane Amanpour and Irshad Manjie, among others, will go to the Israeli journalist Amira Hass, whose unremitting critique of Israel serves as a veritable blood libel against the Jewish people.

Ask the average Jew on the street and he’ll tell you: Israel needs America in order to survive. Indeed, this view is so entrenched in the Jewish community that few dare question it. Just as a baby needs his mother and an injured person needs his crutches, it seems obvious to many that Israel needs America.

It's been a while since the Monitor’s last listing of worthwhile websites and blogs. As always, there’s no particular order to the list, and the views expressed on the various websites and blogs do not necessarily reflect the Monitor’s.

Since creating EndTheMadness seven years ago I have received all manner of correspondence, and it should come as no surprise that for every gratifying e-mail I receive there are plenty more that are disturbing in one way or another. But what if I asked you to guess which e-mails disturb me the most, even momentarily shaking my optimism that there really is hope for our society?

On January 20, President Obama’s longtime friend and adviser David Axelrod appeared at the Jewish Community Inaugural Reception and told the crowd he was there to do “a little kvelling.”

We call it “Simchas Torah.” It is the culmination of our entire holiday cycle. Pesach and Shavuos, then Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkos all lead up to one enormous day of simcha. Why do we associate simcha with Torah? And why is it the culmination of everything?

As U.S. President Barack Obama stubbornly proceeds with his deeply flawed resurrection of a "Two-State Solution" in the Middle East, he will bring substantial harm to the United States as well as to Israel. In this connection, Mr. Obama should quickly recognize that thecore rationale of Jihadist terror has little if anything to do with politics or with military strategy and tactics. Rather, this rationale is, and will surely remain, fundamentally, a sincere expression of religious sacrifice.

The Likud's Danny Danon, named the member of Knesset "most loyal to the right-wing's agenda" in a recent survey, was in New York for September's convening of the UN General Assembly. He was on a mission "to ensure that the world understands the Likud Party and the people of Israel will not accept American pressure on settlement freezes or on construction in Jerusalem."

One of the most remarkable and poignant things about the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families in Jerusalem in 1981 was a wall plastered with notes from survivors and their children looking for lost family members and friends.

This week marks the 36th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, so it seemed appropriate to revisit Richard Nixon’s role in enabling Israel to recover from the staggering setbacks it suffered in the first week of fighting.

There is more than a bit of gallows humor in the following Torah thought, which I’ve heard attributed to several gedolim over the years: Question: Why is it that our children do not ask “Four Questions” on Sukkos? After all, things are far from ordinary – arguably even more so than on Pesach – when we sit down to our first Yom Tov meal outdoors in the sukkah.

In late August, Jewish music sensation and Shlomo Carlebach/Bob Marley hybrid Matisyahu released "Light," his third album. Having enjoyed his first two albums immensely, and already humming some of Matisyahu's new tracks, I began to wax philosophical while listening to his newest compilation. I asked myself: Can we define ourselves by what we think of Matisyahu and his music?

Without getting lost in the immensely dense intricacies of quantum theory and the theories of relativity, we already know that modern physics has witnessed revolutionary breakthroughs in the rational understanding of space and time. Normally, however, these imaginative breakthroughs - which have produced entirely new "paradigms" or scientific models of the physical universe, still remain distant from analytic considerations of international relations and international law.

Following in their mother's footsteps, Rabbis Yisroel and Osher Anshel Jungreis just published their first book (ArtScroll), Torah for Your Table, a collection of essays on the weekly parshah. Hineni founder and longtime Jewish Press columnist Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis compiled the essays, which were originally delivered as lectures at Hineni's Torah classes.

The following is the complete transcript of Prime Minister Netanyahu's address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Sept. 24.