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[Excerpt from full Commentary] [M]y claim to Jerusalem is eternal and unyielding to a Jerusalem indivisible and united, because no one in my family line, going back to the beginning of the exile, ever yielded our claim to Jerusalem. . . [¶] No one compromises on capital cities. America moved her capital around -- from Philadelphia to New York to Washington, D.C. -- but she never offered to split it with the British or Jefferson Davis. No one offers to split Damascus or Beirut or Cairo or Baghdad for peace. No one offers to split Paris or London or Madrid or Prague. [¶] Even the experience with Berlin is instructive. The world forced onto the Germans -- veritably shoved it right down their throats -- the division of Berlin. It barely lasted half a century before the wall came down and the city was reunited. [¶] We owe no apologies, no explanations. . . .
We're Right, the Whole World is Wrong
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong. . .
Now On "Generalissimo Francisco Franco" Watch: The
Difficult Period Ahead For
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
Now Arafat is dead in the land of quiche, mousse, croissant, vichysoisse, and Jew-hatred, consulting with Generalissimo Francisco Franco. And it is not a time for Israel or her friends to celebrate. . . .
[Excerpt from full Commentary] Israel reports that approximately half the suicide bombers who have struck over the past 19 months were residents of the Jenin UNRWA camp or terrorists who were trained there. It also is odd that a "refugee camp" under United Nations auspices has emerged as a terror center where Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Tanzim, and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorists ran wild, stocking arms, building bomb-making factories, and recruiting and training children educated at UNRWA schools to detonate themselves. Perhaps oddest of all is the American role as chief bankroller. [¶] With Washington now scouring its outlays in the face of projected budget deficits, it is remarkable that America continues to pump scores of millions into a U.N. program that has institutionalized dependency among four generations of Arabs--while the oil princes barely contribute. . . .
[Excerpt from full
Commentary]
Sunday, May 5, seemed a day like any other. The world was concerned
about violence in the Middle East. Secretary of State Colin Powell
opined on talk shows that Israel must negotiate new agreements with
Palestine Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
It is instructive that the Arab world does not even have a name for the land. Think about it. "Palestine" is a name that the ancient Romans gave the Land of Israel after that now-vanished empire destroyed the last breaths of Jewish freedom in the Holy Land in 135. The Romans renamed the cities and the land to excise all memory of the stubborn Jewish patriots who had defied the empire from within the Holy Land. So, Jerusalem became Aelonia Capitolina. Shechem became Naples. (Naples later became Nablus.) And the country itself was renamed "Palestine" for the Biblical people who preceded the Jews — the Philistines.
[Excerpt from full Commentary] In time, Arafat nonetheless will pass from the scene. He is aged and manifestly feeble. And though it is not clear whether the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade similarly will move on, let us assume — without any basis — that they also will step aside. Even then, after all the terror-stained Palestinian Arab leaders have departed, and after all Palestinian Arab civilians have compromised on their expectation to extend "Palestine" to the Mediterranean Sea — no American Mideast plan will succeed until Washington finally starts following up on its demands for an absolute end to the teaching and transmitting of hate to the people living under the Palestinian Authority's control. [¶] We continually have failed to recognize that Mideast peace ultimately is not about paper promises but about building a vigorous foundational societal framework that proactively promotes a new way of thinking about the Other. Through all the "peace processes" and "peace plans" Washington has endorsed and promoted since Oslo, we always have failed to demand with sustained follow-up that the educational systems and communications media of the Palestinian Arabs and other Islamist societies stop teaching children and young adults to hate the West. Even as we've been pumping more than $200 million of our tax dollars each year into the Palestinian Authority — and have sent hundreds of millions more to the "Palestinian refugee camps" of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency — we consistently have turned a blind eye to the way they use their schools, summer camps, and radio and television — even their "Sesame Street"-type shows — to promote the most vile anti-Jewish stereotypes and crude distortions of Western society. . . .
[Excerpt from full Commentary] I have been a big-firm business-litigation attorney for nearly a decade. My favorite case matters are those that promptly move towards a negotiated settlement between or among parties who each emerge with something constructive, resulting in a "win-win" outcome. After the parties negotiate their agreement, we attorneys document the settlement and the parties' respective concessions. Invariably, we insert into each settlement agreement a paragraph that seems so obvious, that an attorney omitting it could risk a claim of malpractice: Warranty of Authority to Execute Agreement. Each person executing this Agreement on behalf of an entity or individual and/or in a specified capacity hereby warrants and represents that he or she has been granted the power and authority to make and enter into the agreements and releases contained herein for said entity or individual in the capacity set forth herein . . . . [¶] In plain talk, each party to the agreement affirms that he or she has the authority to negotiate the agreement, the authority to offer concessions in return for counter-concessions, and the authority to enforce the concessions and promises he makes. . . . [¶] If Arafat and, now, Mahmoud Abbas, cannot deliver the goods, then Israel cannot reasonably be expected to offer him concessions and abandon preciously guarded rights in return for peace promises and treaties that are destined to fail ab initio because he lacks enforcement authority. . . .
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
Ultimately
[Excerpt from full
Commentary]Over
the past 18 months, Americans have been bombarded with images comparing
rock-throwing young Arabs with the Israelite David who confronted
Goliath in biblical days.
. . . [¶]
But David did not hijack wagons. And David did not murder children.
. . . [¶]
No minority has found peace or security under Arab Islamic patronage.
Not the Berbers of
[Excerpt from full
Commentary]Israel
has militarily occupied Judea, Samaria and Gaza since 1967, yet has
taken no steps to assert its claim to the territories. While
[Excerpt from full
Commentary] No one in my
family was directly touched by the Nazi Holocaust. Nor did any of my
friends lose any relatives to Hitler. While that unspeakable tragedy has
deeply affected the psyche of every Jew born in the past half century,
not many of us directly experienced what it was like to be a Jew in that
era.
. . . [¶]
Until now. Since Thursday night,
when the first Iraqi Scud missiles landed in Tel Aviv and
[Excerpt from full Commentary] United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has appointed a three-person investigative committee to visit the site in Jenin where Israeli efforts to uproot the infrastructure of terror have prompted Arab allegations of "massacre." However, before the "fact-finding team" is dispatched, those who care about fairness should carefully investigate the investigators. . . . [¶]
[
Excerpt from full Commentary] Through the millennia of Jewish Diaspora, long after Arabs invaded and conquered by right of sword, the land of Judea and Samaria never became an Arab territorial entity. By the 20th century, with the rise of political Zionism, Jews still were the "Palestinians." Thus, the predecessor of the Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post. The predecessor of the United Jewish Appeal was the United Palestine Appeal. Even the American support group for Menachem Begin's nationalist Irgun underground called itself the American League for a Free Palestine.[¶]
[Excerpt from full
Commentary]
So it turns out that the Arabs of Judea and
Samaria really hate the guts out of us Jews.
[¶]
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
Several years ago, before I became an attorney, the news of Iran's star-chamber proceedings and convictions of Jews would have sent me protesting in the streets. I would have joined - or organized - massive protests, including nonviolent sit-downs at major arteries, like Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and Park or Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. [¶][Excerpt from full Commentary]
Either the authoritarians of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority have the power to direct, control, intercept and stymie Arab terrorist attacks against Israel, or they do not. If this year's proliferation of Arab mass murder has been within the Palestinian Authority's power to control, then those events confirm that the Palestinian Authority has no right to exist as a polity. On the other hand, if the Palestinian Authority cannot control the anti-Israel terror emanating from within its borders, then it also has no right to exist as a polity. [¶][Excerpt from full Commentary]
It was three years ago this week that Palestinian Arab murderers bombed Jerusalem's cheery, cafe-lined Ben Yehuda Street into a nightmare of death and destruction - murdering, among others, Yael Botwin, a 14-year-old girl from Claremont. This past week, Mahmoud Abu-Hanud, the butcher who masterminded the murders, finally was uncovered. Yet, paradoxically, he still walks free, while three Israeli soldiers lie dead after their failed effort to apprehend him. [¶]Current Events
Rabbi Dov Fischer’s response to Rabbi Kanefsky’s article
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
[M]y claim to Jerusalem is eternal and unyielding to a Jerusalem indivisible and united, because no one in my family line, going back to the beginning of the exile, ever yielded our claim to Jerusalem. . . [¶] No one compromises on capital cities. America moved her capital around -- from Philadelphia to New York to Washington, D.C. -- but she never offered to split it with the British or Jefferson Davis. No one offers to split Damascus or Beirut or Cairo or Baghdad for peace. No one offers to split Paris or London or Madrid or Prague. [¶] Even the experience with Berlin is instructive. The world forced onto the Germans -- veritably shoved it right down their throats -- the division of Berlin. It barely lasted half a century before the wall came down and the city was reunited. [¶] We owe no apologies, no explanations. . . .[Excerpt from full Commentary] In his latest ad hominem-based syndicated article, the resident radical-Left opinion writer at the Los Angeles Times, Robert Scheer, mocked the intelligence of Attorney General John Ashcroft. In a vertical screed, Scheer wrote the following: Ashcroft is "not the sharpest [tool] in the shed." He "managed to lose a Senate race to a dead man." He "was not picked for his smarts." He is a "Keystone Kop in charge of law enforcement." And, in the most telling comment, "Perhaps it is just too difficult for a stern, God-fearing fundamentalist like the attorney general to fully anticipate the dark side of religion's wrath.". . . [¶] Scheer's writing reflects the polemic arrogance monopolized by a Left that is convinced its ranks are just too smart for conservatives to fathom and that conservatives are just too troglodytic to be liberal. . . . [¶] By contrast, we were told that Jimmy Carter was not merely a peanut farmer but really a particularly brilliant man, studious and capable of grasping every detail of his office, and we were reminded constantly that Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar out of Yale. . . .
[Excerpt from full Commentary] A week has passed since a Ninth Circuit panel held that the Bill of Rights bars the government from requiring children to pledge their allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under G-d, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all (4 U.S.C. § 4). As the intense public reaction to the panel's decision in Newdow v. U.S. Congress begins to settle, it is important to focus on the deeper crisis in our federal appeals courts arising from the Senate Democrats' campaign to obstruct President Bush from empanelling new appeals-court judges. . . .
[Excerpt from full Commentary] If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong. . . .
[Excerpt from full Commentary] In October 1999, I went through the personal tragedy of a divorce. I felt personally lost, very much alone. A lady in my congregational community, Lilly Kahn-Rose, approached me one Shabbat soon after, offering to help me in some way. I responded: "Please invite me and my children for some Shabbat meals, and please help me get some Shabbat meal invitations from others in the community. I can buy cold cuts, side dishes, and challah, can recite kiddush and lead z'mirot melodies, but it is going to be so lonely and feel so minimalist in our apartment. Please help me get me some Shabbat invitations." [¶] A week later, Lilly called me and asked me for my fax number. The fax arrived soon after -- with a list of confirmed Shabbat invitations for my children and me for every Friday night dinner and Shabbat lunch for the next seven months.[¶] Throughout those next seven months, I met a community of wonderful, warm, loving people who are rearing their own families, burdened by their own struggles and concerns, yet who rushed to open their homes to my children and me. During those seven months, I never once felt like a beggar from Jerusalem. Instead, we talked throughout the meals, about mitzvot and ideas, about Israel, about the movies, about the busway, about broccoli in Guatemala, about the stuff that goes on in families. [¶] It made a potentially devastating period in my life not only bearable but extraordinary. I learned much Torah, even though I have some learning. I continued evolving as a person. In fact, Linda Charlin, the hostess in one family that hosted us most frequently, along with the Kahn-Roses, asked me after one Shabbat lunch whether I would be interested in meeting a friend of hers.
[Excerpt from full Commentary] The Christmas season dilemma arises for so many Jews in our city that it sadly deserves attention and comment. When I was a boy, growing up in a parochial Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, I certainly harbored no yearning for a Christmas tree at home. I was thrilled with my little homemade menorah and our family's nifty electric menorah, which we placed in the living room window. [¶] All of East 57th Street between Farragut and Foster Avenues had menorahs, all except for the block's one Christian family, the one with the tree. I barely knew their daughter, Kathy, but she once confided to me how much she wished that she, too, could have a menorah like everyone else on the block, instead of a tree. Over the years I have thought back to Kathy, as my life's travels took me out of Brooklyn's shtetl to a stint as rabbi in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. (Don't laugh - it comes right before "yarmulke" in some dictionaries.) I served a year in Louisville, Ky., not only clerking for a brilliant United States Court of Appeals judge but also serving as a volunteer rabbi for a small congregation there. And that experience brought me to Cincinnati. And, of course, I was rav of a synagogue in the San Fernando Valley. [¶] Through all those experiences I, too, have encountered the Christmas season's presence. At the yeshiva day school I founded in Woodland Hills, we had to contend with parents' desires that we schedule vacation time between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1. Taking my daughters to Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm and Magic Mountain my first winter here, I was visited with Christmas everywhere - not much different from Yarmouth, Louisville, or Cincinnati.[¶] Santa Clauses and tannenbaums and songs of a virgin mother and her infant. The songs are ubiquitous and cannot be escaped, whether at the malls or in the movie theaters or at the supermarket. The television programs all have special Christmas episodes. It really is quite everywhere. And every channel seems to have rights to telecast "It's a Wonderful Life," which really is a wonderful movie. [¶] Christmas is not our day. It is a day that commemorates the birth of a Jewish child who hundreds of millions believe was the Messiah. But we humbly do not share that belief. Indeed, our respectful understanding that he was not the Messiah constitutes the linchpin that ironically differentiates most culturally assimilated Jews in Los Angeles from their Christian neighbors. [¶] For those among us who do not observe the Torah traditions, who do not make Shabbat their special day of enjoyment and delight, who do not behold the cultural beauty of kosher restaurants and kosher foods, who do not study the Tanach or Talmud, who think Jeremiah was a bullfrog and that mikveh refers to a federal judge who used to be an Illinois congressman - ironically, the only point of departure that individuates the assimilated Angeleno Jew from her Christian counterpart is that Jews respectfully demur as to Jesus as Messiah. [¶] But how sad it would be if our community were left with no component of meaningful self-identification other than that negative salient: the common belief that Jesus was not Messiah. And that is why the "Christmas Dilemma" offers an extraordinary challenge or opportunity for us to contemplate not merely what Judaism is not, but what Judaism is. In an era in which a president memorably asked what "is" is, it is fair for Jews to ask what "Judaism" is. It is not about a tree of another religion, marking another faith's holy day. It is something else. [¶] But what is it?
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
Unexpectedly, I found myself traveling on the freeways most of last Wednesday, when the Michael Jackson story erupted into a media feeding frenzy. No matter the talk station, the conversation was salacious, incendiary, and vicious. . . [¶] So I do not know whether Michael Jackson dunnit. And, on a much deeper level, I do not care. I do not associate with Michael Jackson; odds are I will never meet him. The chances that he would invite my pre-adolescent son to spend a night at his ranch are less-than-nil. And — most important here — the chances that, if invited, my son actually would spend a night at Neverland were, are, and always will be, never. And that's the discussion the media should be having about the Michael Jackson issue. What parents would allow their child, in the aftermath of prior scandalous allegations and a mega-million-dollar out-of-court settlement, to spend private time with Michael Jackson? . . .[Excerpt from full Commentary]
It is just plain awful when people decide that it is OK to cheat and steal in the name of Torah. [¶] To facilitate pidyon shvuyim (redeeming captive Jews from secular prisons) we are commanded to go so far as to sell a community's Torah scroll. Yet it is hard to rejoice that Bill Clinton pardoned four chassidim from the village of New Square, N.Y., along with an alleged tax evader who donated megabucks to Israel. In contrast to the complex moral and ethical questions that grated pro-and-con during discussions over the possible pardons of Michael Milken and Jonathan Jay Pollard, there is something unequivocally outrageous in Clinton's decisions to pardon the four Squarer chassidim and the international oil merchant whose dealings prompted the Justice Department to allege, among other things, tax evasion and trading illegally with Iran. [¶] I come from humble roots. My Dad sold toys and stationery goods as a wholesaler in New York City's Lower East Side, working six days a week for his brother. My parents did not go to college. We were not well-connected. We were not connected. When I wanted to go to Columbia for college, I had to figure out how to get accepted on my own, and I had to figure out how to pay my way through the Ivy League. No one helped. [¶] There should be a problem with the calculus that if I steal $10 million dollars and keep $9 million of the loot for myself but disperse the remaining $1 million to charitable causes, then I deserve to be guest of honor at an institution's annual dinner dance. There seems something far more noble in the person who never gets honored but who awakes at 5:30 in the morning, lays tefillin, prays to G-d, goes to work, works hard and accounts for every penny, davens again, feeds a family honestly though humbly, comes home late at night, perhaps after finishing a second job because it takes two jobs to break even, then davens a third time and drops into bed from exhaustion after spending a few moments with the children to teach them values like love, honor, respect, honesty, loyalty, trust, devotion. [¶] It really is horrible, just plain awful, when people who proudly boast that they do not read newspapers and who think that all non-Jews are reincarnated Chmielnitzki Cossacks and Russian pogromists, decide that it is OK to cheat and steal in the name of our Torah. The United States is a warm, kind, and generous country. There is no anti-Jewish head-tax here. And the only ghettoes in which Jews reside in America are those that Jews voluntarily create for themselves, while the only walls within which Jews are enclosed are those at the exclusive "gated communities" for which residents pay a premium.Jewish Laws & Ethics
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
In October 1999, I went through the personal tragedy of a divorce. I felt personally lost, very much alone. A lady in my congregational community, Lilly Kahn-Rose, approached me one Shabbat soon after, offering to help me in some way. I responded: "Please invite me and my children for some Shabbat meals, and please help me get some Shabbat meal invitations from others in the community. I can buy cold cuts, side dishes, and challah, can recite kiddush and lead z'mirot melodies, but it is going to be so lonely and feel so minimalist in our apartment. Please help me get me some Shabbat invitations." [¶] A week later, Lilly called me and asked me for my fax number. The fax arrived soon after -- with a list of confirmed Shabbat invitations for my children and me for every Friday night dinner and Shabbat lunch for the next seven months.[¶] Throughout those next seven months, I met a community of wonderful, warm, loving people who are rearing their own families, burdened by their own struggles and concerns, yet who rushed to open their homes to my children and me. During those seven months, I never once felt like a beggar from Jerusalem. Instead, we talked throughout the meals, about mitzvot and ideas, about Israel, about the movies, about the busway, about broccoli in Guatemala, about the stuff that goes on in families. [¶] It made a potentially devastating period in my life not only bearable but extraordinary. I learned much Torah, even though I have some learning. I continued evolving as a person. In fact, Linda Charlin, the hostess in one family that hosted us most frequently, along with the Kahn-Roses, asked me after one Shabbat lunch whether I would be interested in meeting a friend of hers.[Excerpt from full Commentary] The Christmas season dilemma arises for so many Jews in our city that it sadly deserves attention and comment. When I was a boy, growing up in a parochial Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, I certainly harbored no yearning for a Christmas tree at home. I was thrilled with my little homemade menorah and our family's nifty electric menorah, which we placed in the living room window. [¶] All of East 57th Street between Farragut and Foster Avenues had menorahs, all except for the block's one Christian family, the one with the tree. I barely knew their daughter, Kathy, but she once confided to me how much she wished that she, too, could have a menorah like everyone else on the block, instead of a tree. Over the years I have thought back to Kathy, as my life's travels took me out of Brooklyn's shtetl to a stint as rabbi in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. (Don't laugh - it comes right before "yarmulke" in some dictionaries.) I served a year in Louisville, Ky., not only clerking for a brilliant United States Court of Appeals judge but also serving as a volunteer rabbi for a small congregation there. And that experience brought me to Cincinnati. And, of course, I was rav of a synagogue in the San Fernando Valley. [¶] Through all those experiences I, too, have encountered the Christmas season's presence. At the yeshiva day school I founded in Woodland Hills, we had to contend with parents' desires that we schedule vacation time between Dec. 25 and Jan. 1. Taking my daughters to Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm and Magic Mountain my first winter here, I was visited with Christmas everywhere - not much different from Yarmouth, Louisville, or Cincinnati.[¶] Santa Clauses and tannenbaums and songs of a virgin mother and her infant. The songs are ubiquitous and cannot be escaped, whether at the malls or in the movie theaters or at the supermarket. The television programs all have special Christmas episodes. It really is quite everywhere. And every channel seems to have rights to telecast "It's a Wonderful Life," which really is a wonderful movie. [¶] Christmas is not our day. It is a day that commemorates the birth of a Jewish child who hundreds of millions believe was the Messiah. But we humbly do not share that belief. Indeed, our respectful understanding that he was not the Messiah constitutes the linchpin that ironically differentiates most culturally assimilated Jews in Los Angeles from their Christian neighbors. [¶] For those among us who do not observe the Torah traditions, who do not make Shabbat their special day of enjoyment and delight, who do not behold the cultural beauty of kosher restaurants and kosher foods, who do not study the Tanach or Talmud, who think Jeremiah was a bullfrog and that mikveh refers to a federal judge who used to be an Illinois congressman - ironically, the only point of departure that individuates the assimilated Angeleno Jew from her Christian counterpart is that Jews respectfully demur as to Jesus as Messiah. [¶] But how sad it would be if our community were left with no component of meaningful self-identification other than that negative salient: the common belief that Jesus was not Messiah. And that is why the "Christmas Dilemma" offers an extraordinary challenge or opportunity for us to contemplate not merely what Judaism is not, but what Judaism is. In an era in which a president memorably asked what "is" is, it is fair for Jews to ask what "Judaism" is. It is not about a tree of another religion, marking another faith's holy day. It is something else. [¶] But what is it?
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
It is just plain awful when people decide that it is OK to cheat and steal in the name of Torah. [¶] To facilitate pidyon shvuyim (redeeming captive Jews from secular prisons) we are commanded to go so far as to sell a community's Torah scroll. Yet it is hard to rejoice that Bill Clinton pardoned four chassidim from the village of New Square, N.Y., along with an alleged tax evader who donated megabucks to Israel. In contrast to the complex moral and ethical questions that grated pro-and-con during discussions over the possible pardons of Michael Milken and Jonathan Jay Pollard, there is something unequivocally outrageous in Clinton's decisions to pardon the four Squarer chassidim and the international oil merchant whose dealings prompted the Justice Department to allege, among other things, tax evasion and trading illegally with Iran. [¶] I come from humble roots. My Dad sold toys and stationery goods as a wholesaler in New York City's Lower East Side, working six days a week for his brother. My parents did not go to college. We were not well-connected. We were not connected. When I wanted to go to Columbia for college, I had to figure out how to get accepted on my own, and I had to figure out how to pay my way through the Ivy League. No one helped. [¶] There should be a problem with the calculus that if I steal $10 million dollars and keep $9 million of the loot for myself but disperse the remaining $1 million to charitable causes, then I deserve to be guest of honor at an institution's annual dinner dance. There seems something far more noble in the person who never gets honored but who awakes at 5:30 in the morning, lays tefillin, prays to G-d, goes to work, works hard and accounts for every penny, davens again, feeds a family honestly though humbly, comes home late at night, perhaps after finishing a second job because it takes two jobs to break even, then davens a third time and drops into bed from exhaustion after spending a few moments with the children to teach them values like love, honor, respect, honesty, loyalty, trust, devotion. [¶] It really is horrible, just plain awful, when people who proudly boast that they do not read newspapers and who think that all non-Jews are reincarnated Chmielnitzki Cossacks and Russian pogromists, decide that it is OK to cheat and steal in the name of our Torah. The United States is a warm, kind, and generous country. There is no anti-Jewish head-tax here. And the only ghettoes in which Jews reside in America are those that Jews voluntarily create for themselves, while the only walls within which Jews are enclosed are those at the exclusive "gated communities" for which residents pay a premium.American Law
Pledge of Allegiance and Federal Court Judges
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
A week has passed since a Ninth Circuit panel held that the Bill of Rights bars the government from requiring children to pledge their allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under G-d, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all (4 U.S.C. § 4). As the intense public reaction to the panel's decision in Newdow v. U.S. Congress begins to settle, it is important to focus on the deeper crisis in our federal appeals courts arising from the Senate Democrats' campaign to obstruct President Bush from empanelling new appeals-court judges. . . .Media Bias
Counterpunch: Hollywood Isn't Fair to Jews Either
[Excerpt from full Commentary]
When African American filmmakers are upset about perceived inequities in Hollywood, they can blame the Jews. When a Christian (Nikos Kazantzakis) writes a sacrilegious novel about Jesus and a second Christian (Martin Scorsese) converts the book into a film, fundamentalists on the periphery still find an angle to blame the Jews.[¶] They are lucky.[Excerpt from full Commentary]
Sunday, May 5, seemed a day like any other. The world was concerned about violence in the Middle East. Secretary of State Colin Powell opined on talk shows that Israel must negotiate new agreements with Palestine Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.[Excerpt from full Commentary]
It is instructive that the Arab world does not even have a name for the land. Think about it. "Palestine" is a name that the ancient Romans gave the Land of Israel after that now-vanished empire destroyed the last breaths of Jewish freedom in the Holy Land in 135. The Romans renamed the cities and the land to excise all memory of the stubborn Jewish patriots who had defied the empire from within the Holy Land. So, Jerusalem became Aelonia Capitolina. Shechem became Naples. (Naples later became Nablus.) And the country itself was renamed "Palestine" for the Biblical people who preceded the Jews — the Philistines.[Excerpt from full Commentary]
In his latest ad hominem-based syndicated article, the resident radical-Left opinion writer at the Los Angeles Times, Robert Scheer, mocked the intelligence of Attorney General John Ashcroft. In a vertical screed, Scheer wrote the following: Ashcroft is "not the sharpest [tool] in the shed." He "managed to lose a Senate race to a dead man." He "was not picked for his smarts." He is a "Keystone Kop in charge of law enforcement." And, in the most telling comment, "Perhaps it is just too difficult for a stern, God-fearing fundamentalist like the attorney general to fully anticipate the dark side of religion's wrath.". . . [¶] Scheer's writing reflects the polemic arrogance monopolized by a Left that is convinced its ranks are just too smart for conservatives to fathom and that conservatives are just too troglodytic to be liberal. . . . [¶] By contrast, we were told that Jimmy Carter was not merely a peanut farmer but really a particularly brilliant man, studious and capable of grasping every detail of his office, and we were reminded constantly that Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar out of Yale. . . .Parsha Commentaries
Parshat Vayishlach
Parshat Miketz
Parshat Bo
Parshat YitroParshat B'ha'a'lot'kha
Parshat D'varim