This week’s bid by Agudath Israel of America to secure funding for Israeli families from the national network of Jewish charitable federations might appear at first glance to represent a step forward, indicating a new willingness on the part of ultra-Orthodox leaders to establish formal relationships with the rest of American Jewry.But theRead More
Eleven score and seven years ago, an unlikely collection of lawyers, businessmen and plantation owners gathered in Philadelphia and brought forth what remains one of the most remarkable social experiments in human history: the United States of America.The new nation, as envisioned in the declaration signed that July day in 1776, was to be unlikeRead More
In announcing this week that the Jewish state would grant equal status to Reform and Conservative conversion ceremonies for purposes of citizenship and population registry, Israel’s interior minister took one of those political steps that shouldn’t have been necessary, but was.The unilateral declaration by the minister, Avraham PorazRead More
When Israel first threw open its doors in 1984 to Jewish immigration from Ethiopia, the move was rightly hailed as a watershed moment in Zionist history. The Jewish state had become, as Israeli officials and Jewish activists justly boasted, the only country in human history to welcome masses of African immigrants as brothers, not slaves.Today thisRead More
Beyond the grim specter of the most populous state in the union experiencing political and fiscal meltdown, what’s most frightening about the gubernatorial recall effort now underway in California is the sense that in the Golden State we may be witnessing, as we so often do, our future. California, which gave us the movies, themeRead More
It was 1,000 days ago this week, on September 28, 2000, that Palestinian rioting first broke out in Jerusalem, setting off a cycle of murderous violence that hasn’t stopped yet. While the rioting was at first a momentary event — described by Palestinians as a reaction to Ariel Sharon’s Temple Mount visit that day, though it seemsRead More
That new Jewish demographic study released in New York this week examined only the Jews of metropolitan New York. Folks in other communities might be tempted, therefore, to think that the survey’s astonishing findings — including skyrocketing poverty and a surging Orthodox population — are none of their business. But that wouldRead More
Prime Minister Sharon had three very good reasons to go to Aqaba this week and offer the string of conciliatory gestures he presented to the Palestinians. Each reason is compelling on its own merits. Taken together, they ought to give pause to the nay-sayers who claim they’re fighting for Israel by resisting PresidentRead More
You might think that after promising to cut taxes for all Americans and then discovering that 50 million households — those that most needed it — would get nothing, the Republican leadership would be embarrassed and try to fix things. But that would understate the chutzpah of the Republican leadership, which knows, it seems, noRead More
May was a bad month for heroes. First there was that embarrassing disclosure about William Bennett, the former education secretary and Republican moralist-in-chief, who turned out to have been hiding a massive gambling addiction. To the delight of his detractors and mortification of his admirers, Bennett turned out to be exhibit A in his ownRead More
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