There is a growing unease in Jewish life today—an ache that defies easy naming but demands honest reckoning. It is the feeling of crying wolf. We sense it in our synagogues and institutions, and even within the Anti-Defamation League—the very organization founded to guard us from defamation. It is the dread of watching antisemitism spread once again, coupled with the fear that our own warnings are beginning to lose their power. We are shouting for the world to listen, yet our voices are starting … [Read more...]

On Tuesday, Britain’s prime minister declared that his nation stood at a fork in the road, urging his countrymen to choose between decency and division, between renewal and decline. Two days later, in Manchester, the reality of that choice came crashing down when a terrorist attacked worshippers on Yom Kippur, first with a car and then with a knife, outside a synagogue. Two men were killed, others were injured, and the sanctity of the holiest day in the Jewish calendar was desecrated. Political … [Read more...]

For decades, world leaders have repeated the same formula with ritual devotion: “We support a Palestinian state.” It has become a mantra in Paris, London, Canberra, and Washington, as though saying it often enough will make it real. But the harder question remains unasked: do Palestinians themselves, as represented by their leaders and institutions, truly want statehood—if that state must exist alongside a sovereign Jewish state? The historical record suggests otherwise. Ernest Bevin, Britain’s … [Read more...]

Just as I have a problem with pro-Palestinian protestors who conceal themselves behind N95 masks and keffiyehs, or with Klansmen who once terrorized Jews and Blacks beneath their hoods, I have the same issue with ICE officers and other agents of the state who cover their faces when detaining human beings. The principle is the same: free societies cannot tolerate anonymous power. The sight of protestors in America today, masked with N95s and draped in keffiyehs, chanting for “liberation” and … [Read more...]

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, is the latest and most chilling chapter in America’s descent into what some analysts have rightly called an “assassination culture.” The targeted killing of a political figure by a sniper, once unthinkable in American life, now feels like the culmination of a season of escalating violence: a UnitedHealthcare CEO gunned down in Manhattan, an attempted assassination of a former president, Jewish staffers murdered outside the Israeli … [Read more...]

Our country is broken, and we need to find a way back. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is not just the death of a man but a devastating wound to our democracy. No matter how much Kirk’s words made your blood boil, the response in a free society must never be murder. The genius of democracy lies in its ability to hold arguments without bloodshed, to sustain rhetoric, dissent, and debate without crossing into violence. When rhetoric gives way to bullets, when disagreement turns into … [Read more...]

On September 11, 2001, the world changed. For those who lived through that day, the memories remain seared into the soul: the towers collapsing, the sky darkened with ash, the stunned silence of city streets, the sound of sirens that seemed never to cease. Yet alongside the grief and the fury there emerged something unexpected, something almost transcendent: unity. In the days and weeks that followed, America was, perhaps for the last time in our generation, a nation bound together. Strangers … [Read more...]

https://jstreetdotorg.substack.com/p/the-state-of-hamas-in-gaza-after?r=e0qcq&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true J Street’s recent essay, “The State of Hamas in Gaza After October 7,” reads less like sober political analysis and more like a bedtime story for worried American Jews. Its refrain is soothing: Hamas has lost control, Gaza is rejecting its rule, its military is crippled, and its days are numbered. Who would not want to believe that? After October 7—the most traumatic day in … [Read more...]

The mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim—redeeming captives—has always stood at the very heart of Jewish ethics, described in rabbinic sources as a “mitzvah rabbah,” a great commandment, whose urgency eclipses almost all other obligations. The Talmud in Bava Batra 8b explains that captivity is considered worse than famine, the sword, or even death itself. Death brings finality, but captivity prolongs suffering, degrading both body and spirit. For this reason, Maimonides insists in his Mishneh Torah that … [Read more...]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/opinion/international-world/friedman-israel-gaza-hamas.html Thomas L. Friedman’s column strings together a series of indictments—pariahdom, wanton homicide, political cynicism, deliberate immiseration, communal rupture—and treats them as self-evident. They aren’t. Each claim, examined against the public record and the actual logic of the war, fails to bear the weight he puts on it. Start with the “pariah state.” “Pariah” is not disapproval; it is … [Read more...]