InDepth

"Israel does not interfere in Iran's internal affairs." That is more or less the reaction of Israeli officialdom to the unrest in Iran. Nobody questions this response. We have become accustomed to the fact that our response is not important. What does the oppression in China have to do with us? Why does the war in Chechnya concern us? Why is the slave trade in Sudan our business? And even more so, what does it matter what we think about Iran?

Everyone seems to be obsessed with Jews. Although numerically we are an insignificant minority of the world's population, the media focus like lasers on everything we say and do.

Sam Ehrenhalt no doubt would have thought it ironic that The New York Times gave him such a laudatory send-off a few days after he passed away on May 31 at age 83.

As a congregational rabbi, I often see people in hospitals and other health care facilities. While each building may look different, the actual differences are rather minute. It was my privilege recently to visit a hospital that is a definite exception to that rule.

Adopted in 1945, the UN Charter (Article 80) states: "… nothing in this Chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties."

Thirty-three years ago this week in Entebbe, Uganda, it took Israeli commandos mere minutes to conduct one of the greatest and most daring rescue missions in modern history.

Dear Senator Menendez, As a politically conservative Jew with a strong attachment to Israel, I commend you, a liberal non-Jewish Democrat, for your strong public stance in favor of the Jewish state. Your recent speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, widely circulated on YouTube, directly contradicts the sentiments of our president vis-à-vis Israel as expressed in his June 4 Cairo speech and in other contexts.

In January 2001, as President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak begged Yasir Arafat to take a break from killing Jews to accept the Old City of Jerusalem, hundreds of thousands of Israelis rallied in Jerusalem to oppose the city’s division. Simultaneously, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein's Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun hosted an event in solidarity.

As I have reported many times over the past 12 years that I have been writing this column, one of the major problems in Poland today, even greater then anti-Semitism, is the poor condition of Jewish historical sites. Many of the cemeteries are overgrown and synagogue buildings are in disrepair.

In 1882, Leo Pinsker, a Jewish physician of Odessa, horrified by the pogroms of 1881, concluded (quite reasonably, to be sure) that anti-Semitism is an incurable psychosis. The remedy, he then adduced, must be for all Jews to accept the imperatives of self-help and self-liberation. Later, Theodore Herzl, having witnessed the spectacle of Alfred Dreyfus in France, wrote The Jewish State.

I am about to deliver a lecture in a glamorous building in Riga, one of the best examples of the Art Nouveau architecture style that makes the capital of Latvia so famous. The large seminar room is filled beyond capacity.

I had recently had the opportunity to sit down with Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld, author of the new book, The Art of Kavana (Devora Publishing, July 2009) and discuss what it means to truly focus on yiddishkeit.

Tzipi Hotovely, 30, is the youngest member of Knesset and a rising star in the Likud party. She grew up in Rechovot and earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Bar Ilan University, where she served as editor of the Law Review.

We have arrived at a very serious moment in the year. We have climbed the ladder through the events of Purim, Passover, Sefira and Shavuos; now the summer begins. With God’s help we will continue to climb upward toward higher levels of sanctity, but the summer is difficult for Klal Yisrael.

Journalist Aaron Klein’s important new book, The Late Great State of Israel: How Enemies Within and Without Threaten the Jewish Nation’s Survival, illuminates, infuriates, saddens, and cries out to both heaven and humanity.

"Mark my words," Vice President Joe Biden told donors a few months before the election. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama…. We're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he's going to need help … to stand with him. Because it's not going to be apparent initially; it's not going to be apparent that we're right."

Everyone who reads The Jewish Press fully understands that Judea and Samaria are the very heartland of the Jewish People. We also know that no Israeli government has the right to surrender this sacred land to any other sovereign body, least of all to an Arab/Islamic authority that openly seeks Israel's total destruction. Significantly, as I have indicated many times in previous columns in The Jewish Press, Israel's biblical claims to Judea/Samaria are fully and unambiguously supported by pertinent international law.

The Museum Of The History Of Polish Jews is proud to announce the launching of the Virtual Shtetl website, which is devoted to the local history of Jews. Although at the moment of its launch the portal is primarily a source of information, its future is based on the interaction of web surfers using Web 2.0 technology. The medium created will constitute a bridge between the history of Polish Jewish towns and the contemporary, multicultural world.

The Museum Of The History Of Polish Jews is proud to announce the launching of the Virtual Shtetl website, which is devoted to the local history of Jews. Although at the moment of its launch the portal is primarily a source of information, its future is based on the interaction of web surfers using Web 2.0 technology. The medium created will constitute a bridge between the history of Polish Jewish towns and the contemporary, multicultural world.

The Philadelphia Jewish Exponent named him one of the top dozen "Jewish activists of the century." The New York Times called him "a relatively rare voice from the outset in the American Jewish community against the Oslo peace accords." The Wall Street Journal praised him as "wise, brave, and unflinchingly honest."

Have American Jews abandoned Israel in favor of President Obama? This is a central question in the minds of Israelis today.

When President Obama met with 15 representatives of American Jewish organizations on July 13, he told them, Haaretz reported, that he wanted to help Israel achieve peace but that if they were to benefit from his well-intentioned counsel, Israelis must “engage in serious self-reflection.”

On the eve of President Obama's meeting with American Jewish leaders last week, a prominent Jewish journalist urged the White House to take the unusual step of providing a transcript of the conversation.

Apparently it was not enough that many of America’s best-known journalists disgraced themselves and their profession by portraying Barack Obama during last year’s presidential campaign as a savior-like figure come to redeem a sin-sick America. Now that the Anointed One is in a position to exercise his wise and benevolent rule from Pennsylvania Avenue, it will no longer do to cast him as a mere mortal.

Did you hear the speech President Obama delivered in Cairo week before last? I don’t mean just the words but the sound, the tone, the delivery – the way he actually articulated his sentences, the cadences, the pauses and the breaks for applause.

For decades, the bedrock of the relationship between the United States and Israel has been an unbreakable bond built on trust and a mutual respect for the ideals and practices of democracy. Surrounded by enemies on all sides, Israel has always known it could rely on its powerful ally to support and stand with it in times of need. Similarly, in dealing with a region characterized by strife and turmoil, the U.S. has always known it could rely on its sole democratic ally in the Middle East.

President Obama would have better reflected American values in Cairo recently had he spoken with blunt honesty regarding recent Middle East history. Here’s the speech he might have delivered:

The 19th Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow will be held between June 27 and July 5. As always Janusz Makuch, director of the festival has organized an exciting program with all the usual performers and many exciting new exhibits, lectures, tours and musical artists.

The 19th Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow will be held between June 27 and July 5. As always Janusz Makuch, director of the festival has organized an exciting program with all the usual performers and many exciting new exhibits, lectures, tours and musical artists.

Some things never change. Even (or especially) more-or-less apocalyptic threats recur. "It is in the thick of a calamity," says Albert Camus in The Plague, "that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words, to silence." As my faithful readers here in The Jewish Press already know, "silence" is what we shall soon become hardened to in Iran.