יום שישי, י״ד תשרי תשפ״זFriday, September 25, 2026
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This past week, the news of Jacob Ostreicher’s still unexplained surprise exit from Bolivia and the extraordinary extent of the National Security Administration’s program of spying as revealed by Edward Snowden took center stage. And there are important lessons to be learned from both developments in terms of how we should view criminal justice issues.
Apparently there has been no let-up in Secretary of State Kerry’s drive to bring about a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians within the nine-month period he prescribed last year, which ends in April 2014.
Much attention has properly been paid to the problems inherent in the provisions of the Geneva agreement struck with Iran. There are substantial loopholes that allow Iran to run trucks through its commitments and Iran seems to have been able to blunt the full court press that had been mounted against it in the form of economic sanctions and threats of military force.
Despite the interim agreement between Iran and several world powers, which provides for a softening of sanctions in return for a curtailment of elements of the Iranian nuclear development program, many members of Congress have resisted calls from the White House to defer legislation that would impose increased sanctions on Iran should a satisfactory final agreement not be reached or the Iranians fail to adhere to the temporary deal.
The Jewish Press raised some eyebrows with its endorsement of Bill de Blasio in the New York City mayoral election. After all, the editorial positions we’ve taken over the years are not particularly compatible with Mr. de Blasio’s liberal track record.
After nearly five years in office it should be clear that President Obama has always been a man on a mission to change America and the world. To be sure, we couldn’t disagree more with his vision – and in this we think we speak for most Americans.
We find it noteworthy, if not surprising, that with all the well-documented systematic human rights abuses committed by governments around the world – including, but not limited to, China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Zimbabwe – not one resolution condemning any of them is planned by the UN General Assembly.
There is no shortage of pundits who, in pointing out the negatives inherent in the deal the Obama administration struck with Iran over its pursuit of nuclear power, suggest the president and his secretary of state were hoodwinked by the Iranians.
Last week, at the urging of President Obama, the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, by a vote of 52-48, muscled through a change in Senate rules that will severely restrict the use of filibusters by the Republican minority.
It is no secret that The New York Times editorial page is ordinarily in the tank for President Obama or that, conversely, it rarely misses an opportunity to cast Israel in a negative light.
The controversy over President Obama’s several public assurances that Obamacare would permit people to keep their insurance plans is a disturbing reminder of some very troubling things about this president that have come to light during the course of his presidency.
Soon after taking office in 2009, President Obama spoke of reining in the U.S. role around the world and of making a concerted outreach to non-Western countries, particularly the Arab states and Iran, which he said had been unfairly dealt with in the past by the U.S.
Ray Kelly will soon be stepping down as New York’s police commissioner. While he gets near universal kudos for presiding over law enforcement in a city with crime at record lows, he also has his share of critics who fault him for the way he managed the NYPD's crime fighting effort, particularly its stop and frisk program.
When The Jewish Press endorsed Charles Hynes for reelection as Brooklyn district attorney in both the Democratic Party primary in September and the general election in November, we cited as one reason the general notion of hakarat hatov.
A plan by the State Department to transfer to Iraq 2,700 ancient artifacts and thousands of records that belonged to the Iraqi Jewish community but were seized by Saddam Hussein in 1984 has ignited an international firestorm.
In an unusual ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan removed the trial judge from the celebrated stop and frisk case and stayed implementation of the restrictions she imposed on the NYPD in its use of the crime-fighting tool.
The Jewish Press joins Klal Yisrael in mourning the passing of Paul (Moshe) Reichmann, who emerged in the 1980s as the era’s foremost patron of yeshivas and Orthodox organizations in Israel, Canada and the United States.
We urge every eligible voter to go to the polls on November 5. Elected officials tend to pay attention to those who take the time to vote.
The Obama administration is so pleased with the way the first round of talks with Iran have gone in Geneva, it may actually offer the Iranians access to billions of dollars of frozen assets if they promise to roll back part of their nuclear program and take incremental steps to do so.
This past April, with the U.S. voting “yea,” the United Nations General Assembly approved the first UN treaty regulating the international arms trade. The ostensible goal is to curb transfers of weapons that would violate embargoes or abet acts of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. More recently, Secretary of State Kerry signed the treaty on behalf of the U.S.
Lauren’s Law, named for a young girl desperate for a heart transplant whose plight four years ago dramatized the shortage of available organs, is designed to increase that availability. The law went into effect on October 3. A new line on driver’s license applications asks applicants whether they want to be added to New York State’s organ donation registry. Applicants can choose to check either a “No” box or a “Skip this Question” box.
This past June we noted here that the “stunning news that the Claims Conference secured a four-year $1 billion infusion of funds from the German government to aid Holocaust survivors has been largely overshadowed by criticism that those leading the conference mishandled an internal investigation into the embezzlement of $57 million by some employees over a fifteen-year period.”
We were struck by the news that the plush Plaza Hotel is suing New York City over the Bloomberg administration’s placing a block-long bicycle rack across from its main entrance facing Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan.
The Jewish Press joins Klal Yisrael in mourning the death this week of the towering Torah personality, Talmudic scholar and halachic decisor Rav Ovadia Yosef.
We note that the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations will be holding a dinner next week marking 50 years of peerless service to the Jewish community. The dinner will honor recent chairmen of the Presidents Conference as well as its indefatigable vice chairman, Malcolm Hoenlein, who has served in that capacity for more than 25 years and has become the public face of the organization.
Last year, the New York City Commission on Human Rights decided to pursue a discrimination claim against a half dozen chassidic store owners in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section over their posting of signs that stated, “No Shorts, no barefoot, no sleeveless, no low-cut neckline allowed in this store.”
Most analysts seem to be in agreement that Iran has mounted its current charm offensive aimed at President Obama and the West generally because the broad effects of sanctions have been taking hold and causing economic misery across Iran, fanning growing unrest.
As indicated in our front-page news story, the first major Jewish population survey in ten years has turned up troubling statistics. While there has hardly been time to fully digest and debate the just-released report by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, and though some serious definitional and methodological issues will have to be clarified – the Pew Center applied a very broad definition of Jewishness for the purposes of the survey – the results are sobering.
It seems clear that President Obama has decided to delay any military action against Syria, at least in the short term, in order to pursue the utility of Russia’s offer to persuade the Syrians to get rid of their chemical weapons.
Two recent developments would seem to indicate that pivotal fundamentals to the growth of America as the world’s paradigmatic democracy are under assault by overeager governmental officials.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s startling Sept. 11 op-ed article in The New York Times was sobering evidence that President Obama’s self-created Syrian debacle has fostered the appearance of a sea change in international affairs – a sea change to America’s detriment.
The issue of European Union restrictions on participation in activities over Israel’s Green Line continues to roil. By any reasonable measure, the rules made no sense when promulgated and even less now. Yet the EU is resisting American efforts to push back their effective date. And though Secretary of State Kerry’s urging them to do so is welcome, his peculiarly-worded statement raises a concern of its own.
The offer by Russian President Putin to broker a deal that would have Syria turn over its chemical weapons stockpile to the United Nations has given President Obama hope of extricating himself from a mess he himself created.
The high-stakes controversy swirling around Mr. Obama’s seeming confusion over how to address the issue of Syria’s use of chemical weapons appears to be a byproduct of this president’s inability to learn from the experiences of his predecessors.
Last week we expressed our support for William C. Thompson in the Democratic mayoral primary, Scott Stringer for comptroller, and Charles J. Hynes for Brooklyn district attorney. For City Council we endorsed Alan Maisel (46th District, Brooklyn), Mark Treyger (47th District, Brooklyn) and Chaim Deutsch (48th District, Brooklyn). Here are more of our choices:
Despite the fact that over the past decade Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community has been one of New York City’s fastest growing populations, not even one Orthodox Jew has appeared during that time on the ballot for the New York State Supreme Court bench in Brooklyn.
Unfolding events in Egypt continue to confirm just how ill-advised was President Obama’s fateful decision two years ago to embrace the Egyptian version of the Arab Spring.
We have never understood the argument of those who maintain that New York City’s stop and frisk program discriminates against minority citizens. Stop and frisk calls for focusing on certain high-crime areas – which if they happen to be populated mostly by minorities is necessarily going to result in more minorities being stopped. So it makes no sense to extrapolate from this that minorities are being singled out in a discriminatory fashion.
It will be interesting to see whether the Palestinians will gut the new round of negotiations with Israel over the announcement of new Israeli settlement construction –and whether Israel will draw the major share of blame should that happen.
The one constant in the West’s confrontation with Iran over the latter’s nuclear program has been the Iranians’ success at delaying any American acknowledgement that the diplomatic phase may have finally run its course. All the while, of course, Iran has steadily progressed in its march toward a nuclear weapons capacity.
The ability of al Qaeda to so threaten a wide expanse of the U.S. diplomatic mission as to force the closing of our diplomatic posts in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia is truly remarkable. This is especially so given the president’s constant refrain that as the result of his efforts, al Qaeda is on the run and in steep decline.
The Supreme Court has yet to deliver a final word on whether American citizens born in Jerusalem can have their passports list “Israel” as their place of birth if they so choose. Last week, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in the case of Benjamin Zivotofsky, invalidated a federal law authorizing such recordation on the grounds that the president has exclusive power to conduct the foreign affairs of the United States.
The hoopla surrounding the meeting in Washington this week of Israeli and Palestinian representatives appears to be much about little.
The alleged breakthrough orchestrated by Secretary of State Kerry last week between Israel and the Palestinians was the culmination of a series of desperate attempts to project the appearance of progress toward a resumption of real negotiations when, given the current circumstances, none are likely to occur.
President Obama is playing a cynical and dangerous game with his comments in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The problem is not that Mr. Obama may feel that by acquitting Mr. Zimmerman the jury was saying race played no role. That is his prerogative. But it is a problem when the president, in introducing a national dialogue on race relations at this time, indelibly links Trayvon Martin’s death with race and thereby inserts himself in the middle of a concerted effort by some, who will simply not accept the jury’s verdict, to have Mr. Zimmerman indicted on federal anti-hate laws.
In the past we have explored how President Obama’s penchant for unilateral executive actions has resulted in encroachments on the powers of Congress and the courts. This despite the constitutional blueprint for a federal government limited by a system of checks and balances through the Constitution’s separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches.
We are troubled by the reactions of some to the “Not Guilty” verdict in the Zimmerman/Martin case. The unanimous conclusion by the jury notwithstanding, there is a hue and cry that racism was behind the shooting and an injustice was done simply because Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted.
In the beginning, President Obama really thought he could change the world. And he had specific plans to do so, both here and abroad.
It’s time for Secretary of State John Kerry to take stock of his obsessive and peripatetic efforts to get Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. It is an obvious fool’s errand that demeans our diplomatic image around the world.
Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm has retired after sixty years at Yeshiva University. In 1976 Dr. Lamm, after years as a student and then faculty member, was appointed president of YU and rosh yeshiva of YU’s rabbinical school, Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS).
Dominating the public policy discussion in New York these past few weeks have been two pieces of New York City Council legislation relating to the New York City Police Department. One creates the position of inspector general within the NYPD to monitor the department’s activities; the other grants individuals who claim to have been victims of racial profiling the right to bring a lawsuit seeking a court judgment prohibiting similar actions by the NYPD (seeking monetary damages is not provided for).
Mr. Lhota promptly followed up his attack on Mr. Silver with an extravagant fundraising e-mail.
It seems a day doesn’t go by without at least one new revelation about the scope of the federal government’s monitoring of the communications of American citizens (and of perhaps many other people around the world).
No one can envy President Obama’s current dilemma over Syria. His decision to begin arming the Syrian rebels challenging Bashar Assad’s regime drew charges that the rebel forces are driven by jihad movements, particularly al Qaeda. Further, many rebel spokesmen have regularly denounced Israel and suggested that once in power they will end Mr. Assad’s policy of not rocking the boat with Israel. How, then, critics ask, could the president align the U.S. with the rebels?
In a gushing report on the election of Hassan Rohani as Iran’s new president, The New York Times began with this: “In a striking repudiation of the ultraconservatives who wield power in Iran, voters…overwhelmingly elected a mild-mannered cleric who advocates greater personal freedoms and a more conciliatory approach to the world.”
Last month in this space we noted that the New York State Assembly was considering legislation that would prohibit domestic insurers from including on their financial statements investments in companies that engage in investment activities in Iran. These financial statements are relied upon by the state to determine whether the company is solvent and able to pay claims. That bill has since passed the Assembly, but the New York State Senate is balking at passing it as well.
The unauthorized release last week of the text of a four-page order issued by a federal judge sitting on the special FISA national security court has unleashed a torrent of controversy over possible governmental overreaching.
We take it as a sure sign of the times that the recent stunning news that the Claims Conference had negotiated a four-year $1 billion infusion of funds from the German government to aid Holocaust survivors has been largely overshadowed by criticism that those leading the conference mishandled an internal investigation into the embezzlement of $57 million by some employees over a fifteen-year period.
Last week we lauded the efforts of several Jewish organizations to ameliorate the plight of the victims of the recent massive Oklahoma tornado and the extraordinary gesture the owner of Agri Star Meat & Poultry of Postville, Iowa, made in donating ten tons of meat for distribution.
We have no doubt that there is some measure of political partisanship in the controversies swirling around the Obama administration. That is, after all, the American way of governance and, frankly, how wrongdoing is often identified and uncovered. But political maneuvering is just a sideshow that distracts from the questions that should concern us, each of which strikes at the heart of American self-government.
We proudly salute those Jewish organizations that have rallied in support of the victims of last week’s devastating tornado that destroyed a large swath of the Oklahoma City region. As we reported last week, though there are relatively few Jews who live in the area, Jewish groups are providing an array of assistance.
President Obama’s speech on counterterrorism last Thursday at the National Defense University was one of the more impressive he has delivered while in the White House. Indeed, in discussing a reevaluation of how to fight what we all have come to refer to as “the war on terror,” he eloquently identified some profound issues.
Reports that the Obama administration targeted the records of reporters in an effort to determine who in government leaked secret information about a Yemeni bomb plot and a CIA report on North Korea would almost be amusing if the implications weren’t so troubling. Leaking information seems to be a forte of his administration – mainly, it seems, when the image of the president is thereby enhanced.
In an editorial last week (“Circling the Wagons”) we noted the efforts by the administration and its supporters to dismiss allegations that the government’s spin on the Benghazi attack was designed to shield the president and that the IRS was improperly used to stifle opposition to Mr. Obama’s reelection.
As the controversies besetting the Obama administration continue to grow in number and intensity, the prospect that President Obama would seriously consider military action against Iran, should that country continue its drive to become a nuclear power, becomes more and more remote. So we welcome the current enhancement of sanctions against Iran on the federal and New York State levels.
Two recent revelations have raised serious questions about the kind of government President Obama is running.
We were dismayed by the announcement last week from Google that it was changing the name “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine” across its products. In explaining the action, a Google spokesman said that “We consult a number of sources and authorities when naming countries…. In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and other international organizations.”
It seems clear that there is a lot more to the current developments regarding Syria than Israel’s bombing some sites there, though staunching the flow of Iranian weapons to Hizbullah through Syria is plainly a significant objective.
Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent embrace of the Arab Peace Initiative is, to say the least, unnerving. Certainly the response of Arab leaders to his action reflects the dangers for Israel inherent in the plan. President Obama seems to be preoccupied these days with Syria and Iran as well as serious domestic issues and is largely leaving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Mr. Kerry. But the secretary of state seems poised to roil things up without any prospect of real progress.
Syria’s civil war is fast becoming one of the Obama administration’s greatest foreign policy challenges, for the moment even surpassing Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry in its urgency. Together, both issues have effectively derailed the president’s long-range intention to focus on Asia and the emerging economic and military developments in China and other nations in the so-called Asian Pivot.
The investigation into the Boston bombings is still in its early stages but what seems to be emerging is that the presumed perpetrators were not directly linked to any foreign terrorist infrastructure. Rather, they were individual Americans radicalized by jihadist teachings and guided in their weapons-making by jihadist websites.
During the run-up to the confirmations of Secretary of State Kerry and Secretary of Defense Hagel, we and others forcefully challenged the latter over statements he had made about Iran and Israel, and were more favorably inclined toward the former.
This week Jews around the world celebrated Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day. Sixty-five years ago on the day before the British mandate over Palestine was set to expire, the Jewish People’s Council, comprised of the political leadership of the Jewish residents of Palestine, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel.
Recent events demonstrate that the Jewish community is fast losing the free speech wars. Those who wish to condemn Israel at public forums are seemingly immune to efforts at having an alternative view heard, while those who seek to talk tough about radical Islam are vulnerable to being blocked altogether.
We initially thought it rather odd that President Obama chose an audience of mostly students to deliver an important speech during his visit to Israel last month. Indeed, his message was a call for them to change the Israeli system from within so that the government might be more receptive to peace proposals.
Would that more Margaret Thatchers were found in office in capitals around the world.
There is a certain disconnect in the brouhaha over the Cardozo School of Law’s Journal of Conflict Resolution offering its International Advocate for Peace Award to serial Israel-basher Jimmy Carter.
Much has been written about the eleventh-hour agreement between Israel and Turkey designed to mend fences and return to normal relations.
The Jewish Press joins Klal Yisrael in mourning the death of Rabbi Herschel Schacter, paradigmatic pulpit leader, former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and adviser to President Nixon on the plight of Soviet Jews.
We were disappointed to hear from President Obama that he would not break with the precedent set by his predecessors, Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and release Jonathan Pollard. Though we think Mr. Pollard deserved to be punished for his serious crimes, we believe that twenty-eight years of imprisonment is enough.
President Obama’s speech in Jerusalem was remarkable in many ways. Not only did he proclaim U.S. support for Israel and describe Jewish history in glowing – and for an American president, unprecedented – terms, he also seemed to take great pains to address, point by point, the criticism of his 2009 Cairo speech that soured many Jews on his presidency.
President Obama will finally follow up his June 4, 2009 visit to Cairo with one to Israel. Though he was just a stone’s throw from Israel at the time, he chose not to go the Jewish state and it is not too hard to figure out why.
The Obama administration, from Mr. Obama on down, has made every effort to assure that the agenda for the president’s Israel trip and discussions with Prime Minister Netanyahu would center around burnishing the U.S.-Israel relationship and the issues of Iran and Syria.
Ambassador Rice touted the notion of a spontaneous mob action for several days after the event despite the evidence to the contrary. On what basis did Ms. Rice promote the false storyline?
What intrigues us most about Justice Milton Tingling’s decision invalidating New York City’s ban on large sugary soft drinks is that his opinion contained nothing we all hadn’t heard before. The judge said the ban was “arbitrary and capricious” – a judicial no-no that is the legal equivalent of “it makes no sense” – and was improperly adopted by a non-elected Board of Health.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made no bones about his disdain for Israel. Soon after assuming office he gave a speech at the 2009 World Economic Forum at Davos in which he harangued Israel and its policies and publicly insulted President Shimon Peres.
The Obama administration's various policies have signaled to the mullahs that they ultimately have nothing to fear from Washington.
When the White House announced some weeks ago that President Obama would be visiting the Middle East with the goal of burnishing U.S.-Israel relations rather than offering any new proposals for restarting the moribund negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, we assumed it would only be a matter of time before a new intifada broke out.
In his State of the Union speech two weeks ago, President Obama seemed to echo his predecessor’s extravagant “Mission Accomplished” declaration respecting the war in Iraq when he announced that in light of the substantial gains in the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, some 34,000 U.S. troops will return home by this time next year.
The Jewish Press notes with sorrow the recent passing of Rabbi Herbert W. (Chaim Zev) Bomzer, a leading personality in the American Jewish community who served for forty years as the rav of the Young Israel of Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn and for fifty years as a maggid shiur at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.
The controversy over Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense continued to roil this past week with the revelation that he did not provide the Senate Armed Services Committee information concerning several of his speeches to controversial pro-Arab and Iran advocacy groups.
Last week the House of Representatives approved, by a vote of 354 to 72, a bill that would specifically permit the use of federal money to rebuild synagogues, churches and mosques damaged by Superstorm Sandy.
It should not be forgotten that in the immediate run-up to President Obama’s May 19, 2011 speech at the State Department in which he delivered his “ ‘67 lines” scenario for Middle East peace, the informed buzz among Beltway pundits was that the president would break no new ground with his remarks. So much for informed buzz.
Now that the forum co-sponsored by the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and the Brooklyn College political science department has come and gone, it is incumbent on Brooklyn College and Mayor Bloomberg to vindicate their claim that the event had to be allowed to take place in the interests of academic freedom.
Ed Koch’s ebullient personality and can-do attitude provided a much-needed shot in the arm to a city that had barely dodged bankruptcy under the dour and ineffectual Abe Beame, and his willingness to buck the city’s liberal establishment was a balm for New Yorkers, particularly those in the outer boroughs, fed up with the accelerating social experimentation that characterized city governance for decades.
An editorial in Tuesday’s New York Times provides an important perspective on how Israel is viewed by our country’s liberal elites.
Some recent developments fuel speculation as to what President Obama has in mind for the next four years in several areas.
This past Sunday – on International Holocaust Memorial Day – Britain’s Sunday Times ran a cartoon that depicted a burly and menacing Prime Minister Netanyahu, wielding a blood-covered trowel, in the process of building a wall using the blood and limbs of trapped, writhing Palestinians. It carried the caption, “Israeli Elections – Will Cementing Peace Continue?”
We were dismayed by the sudden announcement last week by New York’s senior U.S. senator, Charles Schumer, that he would support President Obama’s nomination of former senator Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense.
September 25, 2026 
