InDepth

The urban political machine has gone national. It's here. It's there. It's everywhere.

There it was, a backyard full of my basement furniture, and bags and bags of waterlogged papers.

The purported electoral appeal of the Blue & White line-up is that it includes 3 former IDF Chiefs-of-Staff, yet virtually invariably when top military figures have departed from their field of expertise (security) & ventured into one where they have none (politics), they have been disastrously wrong.

Unlike some of the older Republican groups in this town, the Rockawayites are an amalgam of many viewpoints and had hoped to use this diversity to good political effect.

The need to fix immigration has been clear for decades. It seems that Trump is nudging Congressional leaders towards a common-sense deal capable of generating broad bipartisan support: dramatically increased border security coupled with an embrace of those whom we have already vetted carefully.

The New York Times has been a leader in the public charge against Israel's policy of preempting terrorist acts by targeting those who send out the suicide-bombing drones. So we can't help but make note of a recent Times obituary reporting on the death of one Rex T. Barber

Salaita compared indigenous Americans to the Palestinians. Then why shouldn't BDS apply against US?

Soon after Cambridge police arrested and handcuffed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. on a disorderly conduct charge, they realized the black man they wanted to prosecute was a renowned academic. As a result, he was released and the charges against him were dropped.

What happens, then, if the regime doesn’t give in and the army doesn’t stop the demonstrations?

When Jacob is fooled into marrying Leah, he accepts her as a partner and eventually the mother of his children. But his yearning is for Rachel.

We are told that “a soldier must have a commander, and it isn’t a rabbi.” The defense minister of Israel accuses us – this writer and other Hesder rabbis – of “destabilizing the foundations of Israeli democracy, inciting toward insubordination, damaging the spirit of the Israel Defense Forces,” adding, “there is no room for such things in a civilized state.”

The entire world is watching and waiting for Israeli cannabis developments. An entire agricultural hi-tech industry could have been established, providing cures for the ill throughout the world and thousands of jobs in Israel

Trump has a Jewish daughter. So what? Barack Obama had a Jewish chief of staff, and he’s the most anti-Israel president in American history.

The death of the legendary actor Marlon Brando brings to mind an incident that tarred his reputation for years afterward and that serves to illustrate how certain Jewish organizations and their self-serving "spokesmen" risk trivializing the entire issue of anti-Semitism.

We are losing the battle of social media that allows today's youth to be educated with lies and deception. Organizations must highlight Israel’s peace efforts and the resistance of the Palestinians

Torah was central to the life of Perry Fish (Z"L). His influence on some 20000 Shabbos guests that came through the warm and loving home he built with his wife Debby is inestimable-and will be missed

Saddam Hussein grew up barefoot in a mud hut in the town of Takrit, north of Baghdad on the Tigris River. He never met his father. His mother, Subha Tulfah, was deeply disturbed, suicidal and homicidal. She repeatedly tried to kill the child in her womb. According to one, probably apocryphal, account, she jumped in front of a bus and screamed: “I am giving birth to the devil!” Some witnesses recalled the pregnant woman banging a door against her extended belly.

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

Yesterday I made an extraordinary and moving shiva visit at the home of the Netanel family, whose son Yonatan was killed last week in Gaza. Unfortunately, he and two other soldiers died when an Israeli tank mistakenly opened fire on a house captured by Israeli soldiers. His father, Rabbi Amos Netanel, was a student at our yeshiva in Kiryat Arba for several years.

The most striking similarity is that both are being investigated for actions that their legislatures have not explicitly made criminal.

Significantly, the demonstrators are pointedly calling for more attention to be paid to domestic concerns and not to the alleged depredations of the U.S. and Israel.

The hegemony over the Hebrew press in Israel by the far Left has always been a threat to Israeli democracy. The Left utilizes its near-monopoly over the press to promote its extremist and defeatist agenda in a naked manner. The Oslo debacle would never have occurred without Israel's far Left exercising near-totalitarian control over the Hebrew press and electronic media.

The wholly-political war waged by Zionophobes has effectively intimidated and prevented religious Jews who identify as Zionists from initiating such claims. But that is starting to change.

Not all conspiracy theories are equal...

After Israel’s War of Independence, poet Nathan Alterman famously memorialized those who fell in that struggle in his poem “Magash Hakesef” – “The Silver Platter.” The reference was to a statement by the country’s first president that no one was going to hand the Jews a state “on a silver platter.” In other words, it would have to be earned by sweat and blood.

Happy Tu Bishvat!

Jewish law stipulates that a Jewish divorce can only be initiated by the husband in an exercise of his free will.

Ever since 9/11, President Bush's constant refrain has been an uncompromising effort at eliminating terror and its infrastructure around the world. Plainly, this has not been the product of a Pollyannish notion of refashioning the world in the American image, but rather of a hard-nosed evaluation of what it will take to minimize the threat from fundamentalists around the world bent on America's destruction.

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As we report elsewhere this week, the Prime Minister of Romania has announced that the deadline for filing claims for restitution payments for those who once held property in pre-war Romania is November 14, 2001.