Monthly Archives: October 2018

Thoughts after a mass murder of Jews

I lived in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood for a few months when I was in grad school. It was a nice, safe, relatively friendly neighborhood. Now it will be known as the site of the worst mass murder of Jews … Continue reading

Posted in American Jews, Jew Hatred, Terrorism | 5 Comments

Jews, come home

Author Naomi Ragen urges Diaspora Jews to “come home” to Israel, and describes her own feelings of the almost miraculous condition of being a Jew in the Jewish homeland: I was walking down Prophets Street (Rehov Hanevi’im) in Jerusalem, thinking … Continue reading

Posted in Israeli Society, Zionism | Comments Off on Jews, come home

Trading sovereignty for PR

I live in a country in which everything is negotiable, everything is negotiated, nothing is final, and nothing is really forbidden, at least for our enemies. Graduate student Lara Alqasem, the former president of a BDS-supporting, Israel-hating, university “Students for … Continue reading

Posted in Israeli Politics | 2 Comments

The One Speech Jacobs will Never Make to Israeli Jews

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism in the US recently published an op-ed in Ha’aretz entitled “The One Speech Netanyahu Will Never Make to Diaspora Jews,” a not-too-clever attempt to imagine what it would be like … Continue reading

Posted in American Jews, Israeli Society | 1 Comment

Fulfilling the social contract

Rousseau explained the social contract that gives legitimacy to the concept of governmental authority: the true sovereign, the people, agrees to give up some of its freedoms and take on some obligations in return for benefits provided by the government. … Continue reading

Posted in Israeli Politics, Terrorism | 2 Comments

JFNA’s chutzpah

I first made aliyah to Israel in 1979, but returned to the US in 1988. During the 26 years between my yerida and my return to Israel in 2014, I became more and more involved in pro-Israel activism, both because … Continue reading

Posted in American Jews | 3 Comments

The war for the political soul of American Jewry (guest post)

I almost never publish guest posts, but yesterday I received this from an old friend, Rob Vincent, and it seemed so on point that I asked him to allow me to do so. Rob has a master’s degree in political … Continue reading

Posted in American politics | 4 Comments

Art for hate’s sake

Emory Douglas, the former “Minister of Culture” of the Black Panther Party, and the premier artist of the black power movement, delivered a lecture to University of Michigan students in which, among other things, he displayed a poster showing Benjamin … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, American society | 4 Comments