InDepth

The great 19th century thinker Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch sees this Torah mandate as reaching beyond the letter of the law to underscore a fundamental axiom in religious life.

A majority of American Jewish voters had deserted Jimmy Carter in 1980, leading to speculation that the Jewish community perhaps was moving away from its longtime loyalty to the Democratic party and rendering obsolete Milton Himmelfarb's famous observation that "Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans."

Then they sue for peace, issue poor-me hand-wringing pleas for international help, and use the lull in the battle to regroup, re-arm and plot their next assault.

The fact that these groups are unwilling to reconsider this strategy despite all the contrary evidence only shows that peace never was their prime goal in the first place.

I wish it were just apocryphal that families, rabbis, doctors, and friends are asked the most intrusive, inappropriate, and invasive questions by shadchanim or other agents about the young man or woman.

The 1980 presidential election, like the Nixon-McGovern matchup eight years earlier, offered a clear choice between a Republican candidate who was unambiguous in his support of Israel and a Democrat whose record was something less than sterling. Only this time, the pro-Israel candidate was the challenger, former California governor Ronald Reagan, while the more problematic candidate was the incumbent, James Earl Carter.

Is this the level of opposition that was mandated by our Gedolim of yesteryear?

The most fundamental question for this new Post-Oslo era is this: How could Israel have allowed itself to pursue the ''peace process'' in the first place? The answers are very likely to raise serious doubts about the nature of secular Zionism itself and its alleged success in resolving the modernity dilemma of the Jews.

Although it played out more than two years after the fact, the 1976 presidential campaign was overshadowed by the Watergate scandal, with voters still angry over President Gerald Ford's pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who resigned the presidency to escape impeachment.

While there is of course more than one way to look at the last two centuries of Jewish life on the planet, one instructive way to summarize them might be as a two-hundred year search for an alternative to traditional Orthodoxy.

We left off last week in the midst of the 1972 presidential campaign, one of the more interesting in terms of Jewish voting behavior. On one hand you had the incumbent, Republican Richard Nixon, whose relationship with Israel during his first term was quite solid; on the other you had his Democratic challenger, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, a leading dove on Vietnam with a not especially inspiring record on Israel.

Still Carter is proud-as-all-get-out of his rendezvous with Middle East history. He trades on it incessantly.

In recent years the American Jewish community has been the target of a campaign that tries to argue that Jews are theologically obligated to support each and every green fad to come along. Several organizations have arisen in the name of "eco-Judaism," which is nothing more than the endorsement of the environmentalist political agenda in the name of Judaism.

There never was much doubt that Jews would vote in large numbers for Democrat Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 - a year when even many moderate members of his own party were high-tailing it away from the GOP's outspokenly conservative standard bearer.

We recently marked the start of a new year on the Jewish calendar, as good a time as any to sum up where things now stand.

The presidential election of 1928 is seen by most political historians as something of a demarcation line in the history of Jewish voting loyalties. It was in that election that the Democrats first began polling landslide numbers among American Jews, as New York governor Al Smith, a Roman Catholic of immigrant stock (whose campaign manager happened to be Jewish) captured 72 percent of the Jewish vote.

Longer curfews is certainly a possibility. But then we are talking of years, not weeks.

Why are Jews still wedded to the Democratic party, years after it stopped making any economic or political sense for them to remain in the marriage? It's a question one hears often from bewildered non-Jews and Republican Jews (Democratic Jews - i.e. the vast majority of American Jews - seem oblivious to the question, let alone any possible answer).

KABUL - Flower Street and its continuation Chicken Street are by far the liveliest and most picturesque commercial thoroughfares in Kabul a river of...

The front page story in last week's Jewish Press ("Israelis Sing Bush's Praises") - coming as it did almost simultaneously with the release of a Gallup poll that, on the surface at least, seemed to dash any Republican hopes that American Jews might be warming to the GOP - inspired a batch of letters and e-mails from obviously intelligent readers who just don't get it.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program.

There are quite a number of justifications often given by parents (and students) for choosing not to enroll in a Jewish day school.

I had a long conversation with my children recently and explained to them that nearly 1000 Jews had been murdered in the past decade because Israeli children had never been taught to read the siddur (Jewish prayer book). Should that sound to you bizarre - if not medieval and superstitious -- then let me explain to you what I mean, the same way that I explained it to my children.

A few items of interest as the Monitor catches up after a break from the regular routine: Reporting on the defeat of Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in an Aug. 20 Democratic primary, the Prince of Palestine, aka Peter Jennings, once again exhibited his bias and unreliability on all matters pertaining to Israel.

According to his 1980 autobiography, Phil Donahue grew up a rather repressed young man, terribly inhibited and plagued by all manner of monstrous neuroses caused by the strict Catholic ambience of his childhood.

Rabbi Sacks is a man with a sharp mind and an ability to appreciate wisdom whatever its source.

The good news is that the ratings for Phil Donahue's new MSNBC talk show are nearly invisible; the bad news is that MSNBC gave this raving anti-American, pro-Palestinian leftist a platform in the first place, reconfiguring its entire nighttime lineup around him and terminating the program hosted by the pro-Israel Alan Keyes in the process.

The Israeli and American Jewish supporters of Oslo are asked to say special Selichos prayers this year in light of the terrible catastrophes inflicted upon Israel by the policies they have forced on the country.

The new Oslo Selichos go something like this:

While many Arabs may have fled to escape the draft, others were expelled by force.

"The incredibly shrinking" New York Times is how George Will describes the one-time paper of record, a formerly respectable journalistic enterprise that, in Will's words, is "reinventing itself along the lines of a factional broadsheet..."