InDepth

A recent headline in the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported that certain military advisers are putting pressure on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to initiate talks with Syria for fear of a Syrian attack on Israel this summer. Those who advocate this policy are controlled by their fear and dread of another summer of the horrors of war.

In the last lap of his second term, George W. Bush has all but fallen off the major media scope. It’s not that he’s suddenly become beloved by The New York Times or that media pundits have now begun to see the light and embrace him. On the contrary, criticism of the president and his policies has become almost second nature to most of them.

It was shocking to see the writer Hillel Halkin marking the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem by calling for its division. In a May 15op-ed in the New York Sun (“Mounting Figures”), Halkin wrote about the concern of Israeli political leaders with demographics. As a solution, he extended their call for territorial concessions even beyond Judea and Samaria, applying it to the capital city of Israel.

One of the many new “minhagim” in the shidduch world concerns two or more siblings who are in the proverbial parsha simultaneously. This is an increasingly frequent phenomenon due to the ever-increasing length of the average dating career.

Devious ideologues hate light because light exposes their loathsome tricks. So it is not surprising that Letty Cottin Pogrebin and her cohort, incisively critiqued by Dr. Kenneth Levin in a recent Jewish Press front-page essay (“The Empty Rage of Jewish ‘Progressives,’” April 20), hate seeing the word “progressives” in quotation marks.

Despite altogether unimagined transformations of weapons technologies, some ancient principles of warfare remain entirely valid. Founded upon the essentially persistent nature of human behavior in organized conflict, these principles can be ignored only at great strategic risk. For the always-imperiled state of Israel, there is especially much to be learned from certain elements of past thought. This includes the unchanging requirements of national survival.

As summer approaches, people are making vacation plans. More and more people are traveling to Poland, to the old shtetl, to see where their families lived for hundreds of years, before coming to America.

Trolling the Internet these past couple of weeks has served to quash any lingering, hopeful doubts that the post-Zionists have indeed won the battle over how Israel is perceived – by Jews as well as non-Jews, Israelis as well as non-Israelis.

All of which leaves us with one of the great "what ifs" of history: What if Eshkol had found his inner Churchill that evening? What if Yigal Allon had been defense minister instead of Moshe Dayan?

Great wars in history eventually become great wars about history. Only a few years after the last soldier leaves the battlefield, accepted truths about the nature of a military conflict and the motivations for it invariably come under assault by revisionists and counter-revisionists whose vehemence can rival that of the original combatants.

Covered with sand and dust, his face the color of chalk, my husband resembled a nomad, shirt ripped, clothes and shoes much the same as one who just crossed a desert. Choked with emotion, he could barely speak when he returned late Thursday afternoon, the fourth day of the Six-Day War, from his first experience at the newly liberated Western Wall.

The Twentieth of Sivan, designated by sages in two different eras to be a day of fasting and commemoration, marks tragedies that befell the Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages up to the Holocaust and was, until the Second World War, communally observed by European Jewry.

This summer, from June 23 to July 1, the city of Krakow will play host to the 17th annual Jewish Cultural Festival, which as usual, is expected to be a resounding success.

Bill Clinton’s apologists continue to insist he was the most pro-Israel U.S. president – ever. Much of this is political theater, of course, as the Clinton Support Network cranks into high gear in its attempt to put Sen. Hillary Clinton into the office her husband occupied from 1993 to 2001.

The nightmare visited upon the elderly couple took its toll. Within the year, they both succumbed to the agony of their ordeal, having been unable to withstand the spiritual loss of their one and only child.

Why did Bahar’s remarks go largely unreported in the Western media? Why does the U.S. continue to deal with, support, fund and urge concessions to the PA when its elected officials call for genocide of Jews and Americans? Why are foreign governments not protesting or demanding a retraction from PA president Mahmoud Abbas?

Sadly, the war in Iraq appears to be lost. The Democrats – like terriers shaking a rat (Iraq), using a plan of funding war for three months (salami tactics), causing the Army command to recognize that Congress, not the president, is effectively in charge – have achieved their goal: implementing withdrawal.

In an unprecedented effort to rally popular support, al Qaeda is apparently trying to refashion its image from an ultra-conservative, radical Islamist group with clear and precise goals – the ultimate being to implement sharia law around the globe – to what the liberal West has long had a soft spot for: a romanticized revolutionary movement of the “Ché” variety, fighting to overthrow oppression and exploitation (which, as the usual story goes, are products of U.S. greed and aggression).

The Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality cancelled the ceremonies last Wednesday marking the fortieth anniversary of the unification of the city in the Six-Day War.

In 1984, the United States rectified a diplomatic anomaly when it formally recognized the Vatican and agreed to exchange ambassadors with the papal mini-state in Rome.

Entering our apartment with Itamar held tightly in my arms, I gazed out over the porch rails at my valley that had been so green.

It is in the silent whispers of our daily Hebrew prayers. “May it be thy will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, that the Temple be speedily rebuilt in our days and grant us a share in thy Torah. There we will serve thee with reverence, as in days of old and as in former years.”

Is it just me, or have you also noticed how our children are introduced to an unusually high degree of competition in school? Every time I turn around it seems they are involved in one or another extracurricular program.

In the winter of 1943, a decision made by a few idealistic and brave pioneers impacted the very future of Israel. In Kfar Pines, members of the religious Zionist youth movement Bnei Akiva mulled over a recommendation by the Jewish Agency that they resettle Kfar Etzion, an abandoned kibbutz located about two miles east of the Jerusalem-Hebron road. They all understood that the task at hand was immense – the area was isolated and heavily populated by Arabs – but they courageously decided to accept the challenge.

It isn’t just about Israel. American Jews, whether politically liberal or conservative, can, should, and do work together with Evangelical Christians. Headlines and stereotypes tend to hype the issues where a majority of (liberal) Jews are at odds with a majority of (conservative) Evangelicals – abortion and gay rights quickly come to mind. But there are many issues, and the list is growing, on which Jews and Evangelicals are working toward common goals.

When a people is under siege it matters more, not less, how the besieged treat each other. Perhaps I am wrong, or only partly right, but it seems as though too many Jews are treating each other in a manner that is hardly loving, ethical or even minimally civil.

First published here almost one year ago, Professor Beres' column about Prime Minister Olmert's devastating policy errors was a warning unheeded. Written even before the 2006 Lebanon War fiasco, it takes on new and especially urgent meanings following the scathing report by Israel's Winograd Commission.

Israel is celebrating 40 years since the reunification of our holiest city, Jerusalem, and the miraculous victory of the 1967 Six-Day War.

While Polish-Jewish relations have grown more and more friendly in Poland, Israel and the U.S., Poland has also been reaching out to Jews around the world.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who died this week at age 73, was one of those figures who constantly attract the media’s scorn. It comes with the territory when you’re either a biblical literalist, a political conservative, or someone not shy about taking a sword to liberalism’s sacred cows. Falwell fit all those categories, making him a three-time loser to journalists whose taste in religious leaders runs more along the lines of a Desmond Tutu or a William Sloane Coffin.