America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

Public relations is nearly the whole ball game and we Jews have lost the battle not just in modern times with Israel but throughout a long and tragic history

There are few choices as personal and important as the educational environment in which our children are immersed for most of their waking hours. Yet in the United States, unless parents want to risk bankruptcy just to afford tuition, they are given no choice.

I call upon President Obama to honor his campaign pledge of 2008 to recognize the Armenian slaughter of 1918 by the Ottoman Turks for what it was - a genocide. I also ask my political opponent Bill Pascrell, to join me in a press conference and call upon the U.S. to put a $25 million bounty on the head of Bashar Assad for his arrest for crimes against humanity, and for the removal of the U.S. Ambassador to Russia so long as President Putin continues to protect Assad.

The Bible consists of 613 commandments, one of which is for a man to marry and have children, and the other is for a man to avoid gay sex with another man. That leaves 611 commandments for gay men to observe. That should keep them pretty busy. Homosexuality should be treated like lighting fire on the Sabbath or eating non-kosher foods, both Biblical prohibitions

When my daughter first made aliyah she was a student at Hebrew University. After a year she called me and told me she was enlisting.

Our government made a commitment to Iraq to return the collection once it's restored.

The communities of Gush Katif were miraculous.

When all the ribbetting is silenced, we begin to hear an old, familiar tune: the melodious song of our own souls.

If the gassing of children is not an urgent matter than nothing is.

Mehmet, perhaps the world’s most famous Muslim who is not a head of state, is a righteous and proud Ambassador of his faith and feels an innate kinship and brotherhood with the Jewish people.

None of this is a criticism of Reform Jews who are my brothers in every way.

What is better, a popular Israel riddled with dead Jews or an unpopular Israel filled with living ones?

In Israel, it’s easy to throw a recalcitrant husband in jail for refusing to grant a get. In the United States it’s much more challenging.

I can forgive Congressman Pascrell for his continued contempt toward me by refusing to address me directly or even mention me by name, even in his letter written in response to mine. But his attack against Israel cannot be similarly overlooked.

We watched and watched, anticipating the kill.

Too many times, the world has learned the hard way by 'turning the other cheek' while dictators terrorized both their own people and other nations.

Being forced to pay taxes does not make us more virtuous people. If it did, our founding fathers would have thanked George III for his coercion.

Senator Lautenberg, how exactly has our President demonstrated his friendship to Israel? He declared Israel's settlements to be illegitimate, put near-unilateral pressure on Israel to make peace without any expectations from the Palestinian side, declared that Israel should return to the arbitrary 1967 borders, and treated Prime Minister Netanyahu shamefully at a March 2010 meeting where he refused even a photo op with the elected leader of the Middle East's only democracy.

I came to know Mr. Shamir quite well when I hosted him at the University of Oxford in the mid-90’s. He seemed all but forgotten even then and told me that his dramatic drop in popularity in Israel had been due to the euphoria over the premiership of Yitzchak Rabin and his dramatic overtures for peace. He told me this with a touch of resignation. It seemed he did feel underappreciated. More importantly, he seemed to divine the coming catastrophe.

A few hours ago I lost my bid to unseat Congressman Bill Pascrell in New Jersey’s Ninth District. But thank G-d, I’m in a good place and miraculously in a good frame of mind. I’m writing this late at night to capture my thoughts and feelings after investing approximately seven months of my life in this endeavor.

Men ultimately fall in love with those women who bring out their best qualities.

It was when Congressman Steve Rothman defended the rights of Former Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddafi’s personal envoy to live peacefully and tax-free next to me that I first thought of running against him. What was Rothman's purpose in defending the right of an envoy of a terror-sponsoring government to live in our midst?

The growing revelations that the Obama State Department watered down public statements on the attack in order to cleanse them of any mention of al Qaeda and terrorism is a travesty.

American Jews – especially those working on campus – don't accept that we have a battle on our hands.

Perhaps our President should focus less on construction of apartments and homes and do something instead about the bombs and rockets that are killings tens of thousands of innocent Arabs.

The world and the United State continue to give Rouhani a pass.

The gradual trickle of self-hatred into the Jewish soul is evidencing itself in the American Jewish public.

Islam is undergoing a modern crisis which perhaps only its clerics and lay leaders can rescue it from.

In the Hebrew Bible everyone is flawed and everyone makes mistakes.

Today’s model of outreach is fatally flawed seeing as it necessarily forces a choice on non-affiliated Jews to choose between the Jewish and mainstream worlds.