InDepth

Israel's policy of opacity or deliberate ambiguity on nuclear weapons had already been breached long before Prime Minister Olmert's public statement on December 11th. And it was also breached at the prime-ministerial level, no less. More than 10 years ago, Shimon Peres explicitly undermined Israel's longstanding commitment to keep the bomb in the "basement."

Insensitive Tabloid    Kudos for calling out the New York Post on its habit of topping stories involving Jews with headlines that are at best...

I grew up during the 1970's, universally acknowledged as a truly horrendous decade.

Three individuals, two Jews and a gentile, played crucial roles in keeping Truman from caving to the anti-Zionist forces in his administration.

Two years ago I was in Baltimore on business and happened to pass by the public menorah in front of Johns Hopkins University just as the first light was being lit.

Many in the Jewish community have been comparing NK cult members to the kapos who collaborated with the concentration camp officers and other Nazis during World War II.

Honestly, would we imagine ever not paying the custodian on time? Would we expect the custodian to return to work month after month without receiving his salary?

“Iraq cannot be addressed effectively in isolation from other major regional issues, interests, and unresolved conflicts,” the ISG report declares. America cannot “achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

The report issued by the Iraq Study Group, headed by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, urges President Bush to adopt policies that amount to ignoring 13 years of Pal-estinian terrorism, incitement to hatred and murder of Israelis by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and failed concessionary Israeli policies, while at the same time calling for even more Israeli concessions to the Hamas/ PA regime.

When Rachel Factor was searching for a title for her new show, the words "not even normal" kept popping into her head.

Blessed by newly anticipated changes in American foreign policy, certain of Israel's adversaries could soon attempt to bring the Jewish State into the eternal darkness, into fire, into ice. It is therefore essential for Israel's leadership to take immediate steps to ensure that a Baker-Hamilton [Iraq Study Group heads] engendered failure of Israeli deterrence will not occasion a regional nuclear war. Israel must continue to plan around the sound understanding that nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence remain critically interrelated.

We recently returned to Israel after a short visit to the United States.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened an exhibit last week remembering the children of the Lodz Ghetto.

Ben-Gurion No Model    Assemblyman Dov Hikind's column on Ehud Olmert in last week's Jewish Press quoted David Ben-Gurion saying "We chose a Jewish state...

The failure of the noble American effort in Iraq marks the death of modern political idealism.

If Neturei Karta (NK) did not exist, anti-Semites, Islamist terrorists, and neo-Nazis would have to invent it.

Hostility to Israel is generally not thought of as a job requirement for American journalists who cover the Middle East, but it might as well be. That this was not always the case simply confirms how drastically the media climate has changed over the past four decades.

Perhaps my gratitude for the chance to bond so intimately with precious souls of a different generation stemmed from having been cheated (by the Nazi vermin) of the privilege of knowing my own grandparents.

We Jews have had to grow accustomed to perverse celebrations of death by large segments of the Islamic world. Sadly, such familiarity is now compelled by the rationale of Islamic terrorists in justifying their wanton murder of Israelis. For these terrorists, the Jewish worship of life is a sign of weakness and an expression of shaky faith.

Recently the Jewish cemetery at Wysokie Mazowiecie held a ceremony marking the first stage of its restoration project.

Information Sought    I am looking for Arthur Kurtz, whose photograph of my late husband, Rabbi Meir Kahane, zt"l, appeared in a Brooklyn College newspaper...

Doctor Leonard Samson, better known as "Doc Samson," strides down the corridor and into the classroom, massive muscles rippling beneath his skin-tight red costume. He sports a long mane of hair, just like his biblical namesake (except the real Samson's hair wasn't green, presumably).

At the restaurant farewell dinner, Professor Dov Zlotnick asked the dozen or so students of his forty-year-running Saturday afternoon Talmud shiur to continue their learning despite his approaching retirement to Jerusalem.

In late November, mobs in Paris once again shouted "Death to the Jew" - the very chant that came to characterize the Dreyfus case. The Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer team had won its match with the Paris Saint-Germain team. An angry mob surrounded a French Jew named Yanniv Hazout and yelled "kill the Jew," "dirty Jew," "dirty Negro," with many raising their arms in Nazi salutes. A black French policeman rushed to Hazout's defense. The crowd threatened to kill them both. The officer fired his gun and killed one demonstrator and wounded another.

The whole world seemed to be celebrating the composer Steve Reich's 70th birthday in October (October 3, to be precise). The New York Times ranked him "among the greatest composers of the century." The New Yorke rsaid he was"the most original musical thinker of our time." The Village Voice declared him "America's greatest living composer." The Guardian (London) summed it all up by stating, "There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history, and Steve Reich is one of them."

Reaction some months back to the Monitor’s Summer Reading List (June 23) was gratifying enough to warrant a list of recommended books for intelligent readers during the coming cold-weather months. The previous list concentrated on books about the Middle East; this one focuses on politics, New York and national.

One of the most basic facts about our current Clash of Civilizations remains unrecognized. The true rationale of Arab/Islamic suicide bombing terrorism does not lie in politics. It is, more than anything, an example of religiously based blood sacrifice, a primal ritual designed to enlist divine assistance in Jihad.

A visit to the United States, while pleasant, often restores for us the excitement of living in Israel and reminds us of why we went to live there in the first place - especially around this time of year.

Misplaced Criticism?    To suggest that criticism of France "is now off limits at the ADL" because I was given an award by President Jacques...

A fascinating question of history is what might have happened had Neville Chamberlain not resigned in May 1940 but continued on as British prime minister, with Winston Churchill never taking command.