יום שישי, כ״ו חשוון תשפ״זFriday, November 6, 2026
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On recent occasions we have noted that several of President Obama’s public actions reflect a disdain for the traditional American view of the governmental process. Most stunning perhaps was his threat to the Supreme Court that it had better come out his way on Obamacare, or else. Having steamrolled the legislation through Congress (urging, it will be recalled, violations of longstanding procedures if necessary) he issued his challenge to the Supreme Court despite its constitutional duties to pass on the law’s constitutionality.
The highly publicized IDF expulsion from Hebron’s Beit Hamachpela of Jews who purchased and were residing in it was an extraordinary event. And it does not bode well for what we can expect from the Israeli government regarding historical Jewish sites.
For several days the media seized on the furor unleashed by comments made by Hilary Rosen – described rather vaguely in news accounts as a Democratic Party strategist and White House adviser, though she has visited with the president on at least 35 occasions, more frequently than the heads of key government agencies – about Ann Romney, wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
The announcement last week that, at the initiative of the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and some of their senior aides are scheduled to meet soon in Jerusalem underscores a striking fact about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It comes after a several months-long virtual vacuum of attention pertaining to the matter, and no one seemed to care.
Much attention has properly been paid to President Obama’s unprecedented remarks about the Supreme Court, which, he worries, may find his signature health care law unconstitutional. It will be recalled that the president spoke after the oral argument in the case in which the justices asked many highly critical questions about the constitutionality of the law and comments from many legal observers that the law is in trouble.
President Obama’s extraordinary public broadside on Monday against the Supreme Court, in reaction to questions posed by the justices during the course of three days of oral argument in the Obamacare case, is further confirmation that liberal supporters of Obamacare, including the president himself, are beginning to panic.
We were gratified that the anti-Israel Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement failed in its bid to bring the Park Slope Food Co-op, located in Park Slope, Brooklyn into its ranks. Last week, co-op members voted overwhelmingly against a motion calling for a referendum on whether to join BDS and refuse to carry Israeli goods.
The Jewish Press joins Klal Yisrael in mourning the loss of Rav Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg, a world renowned Talmudist and posek, longtime rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva Torah Ore in Jerusalem, and one of the foremost figures in the yeshiva world for three quarters of a century.
We share the dismay many have expressed over the recently announced decision by the State University of New York to abandon a longtime practice and no longer refrain from scheduling classes on major Christian and Jewish holidays. Nothing in the nature of new facts on the ground has been offered by the university to explain the controversial move, though concerns for Muslim sensitivities were apparently behind it.
For those of us with an abiding concern that a reelected Barack Obama, free of the fear of the dynamics of another political campaign, will revert back to his full-court press against Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians – even at substantial cost to its national and security interests – the president’s widely reported overheard comment the other day to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was anything but reassuring.
The Jewish Press joins Klal Yisrael in mourning the death of Rav Moshe Yehoshua Hager, the Vishnitzer Rebbe in Bnei Brak since 1972 and a major Torah personality for more than sixty years.
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton’s condemnation of the murders in Toulouse, France, on Monday was symptomatic of the problem facing Israel in the international community.
It has largely passed under the radar screen, but Stephanie Rose, who was the deputy chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in northern Iowa at the time of the Agriprocessors immigration and Rubashkin prosecutions, has been nominated by President Obama to be a federal judge.
A new book by foreign policy pundit Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism, seems certain to reignite the debate over President Obama’s feelings toward Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the focus will be a little different this time around. It will be not on his exposure to the likes of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, William Ayres or Rashid Khalidi but rather on the prominent members of the Chicago Jewish community who took him under their wing.
The Jewish Press urges its readers in the 27th Senate District to vote for Lew Fidler in the special election on Tuesday, March 20. As New York City Councilman representing Marine Park, Mill Basin, Sheepshead Bay and Madison, Mr. Fidler has ably represented the interests of his Orthodox Jewish constituents and deserves their support.
The current New York State Senate redistricting map championed by the Republican majority calls for the establishment of what has been characterized as a super Jewish district.
The New York Times recently threw a hissy fit over what it felt were overzealous efforts by Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly to defend NYPD anti-terrorist surveillance programs the Times opposes.
While the personal relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu thankfully seems to have taken a turn for the better, and on several issues they had a meeting of the minds – it seemed almost like a minuet – there is no escaping the reality that sharp policy differences remain on some fundamental issues.
Several weeks ago it was reported that Robert “Bud” McFarlane, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser at the time of the Pollard arrest and obviously someone privy to all the information known to the government – wrote a letter to President Obama asking that Mr. Pollard’s sentence be commuted to time served.
We can be justly proud of all the media coverage revolving around a group of Orthodox Jewish students at Houston’s Beren Academy who had decided not to participate in a prestigious basketball competition if it conflicted with the requirements of their faith.
We are now more than ten years into America's invasion of Afghanistan, which was designed to rout the Taliban who had harbored Al Qaeda. The fighting has resulted in thousands of American and NATO deaths and casualties as well as billions of dollars spent. It would appear, however, that little has been accomplished in terms of American goals, with the Taliban still a formidable military and popular force in the country.
There is something off-putting about President Obama’s having announced in a video that his reelection campaign was launching a movement called “African-Americans for Obama.” The unease is not over an appeal to a particular ethnic group, which is a hallmark of American political campaigns.
We are encouraged by signs that shortsighted attempts by some Muslim groups to blunt the obviously successful proactive NYPD anti-terrorism programs – programs that involve heightened scrutiny of some Muslim-Americans – are not getting any traction.
It seems like only yesterday that the Obama administration missed no opportunity to declare its solidarity with Israel regarding the threat of a nuclear Iran.
We were disappointed by the Obama administration’s announcement that it intended to ask Congress to waive a ban on funding UNESCO because of its recognition of Palestinian statehood.
The two apparently coordinated attacks on Monday against Israeli diplomatic personnel present Israel with a significant challenge of how to respond, aside from an obvious concern for the safety of its citizens abroad.
In many respects President Obama’s imposition of a federal mandate calling for free contraception and certain abortion procedures on demand – and the uproar it has caused – is emblematic of the problems inherent in the way he sees his role.
The Affordable Health Care Act is the official title of what has become known, primarily to its opponents, as Obamacare. It provides for a variety of changes in the American health care system and has generated enormous controversy, some of which will be the focus of the Supreme Court in the next few months.
Many of us continue to be apprehensive about what the Middle East policy of a reelected President Obama would look like. Though Mr. Obama continues to insist that U.S. support for the security of Israel is "unshakable," his turnaround on pressing Israel on the 1967 lines and settlement growth, while welcome, was unnerving. Not only did it occur at the outset of the presidential campaign season, it was also uncommonly abrupt.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas's statement last Saturday that "Israeli intransigence" was behind the collapse of the recently convened Israel-Palestinian talks in Jordan may provide a moment of truth for President Obama.
The current controversy surrounding the film "The Third Jihad" is ostensibly over the propriety of the NYPD's airing it as part of in a training program.
A significant number of suicide attempts are committed by boys from not just religious but rabbinic homes -- because they thought they were homosexual and had no place in the Orthodox world they grew up in, even if they had never acted on those impulses.
Given its context, the recent declaration of the mufti of Jerusalem that it is Muslim destiny to destroy the Jewish people cannot be dismissed as the primitive rant of a crackpot cleric.
We were dismayed by a press release the other day from the World Jewish Congress describing a meeting WJC leaders had with PA President Mahmoud Abbas in London.
No one in the know is talking about the reason(s) for the abrupt postponement of the of those much ballyhooed joint U.S.-Israel military maneuvers that had been scheduled for this spring.
Back in September 2011, in an editorial titled "Magen David Adom: No Time to Blink," we expressed our dismay over reports in several Israeli newspapers that Israel's national ambulance service – its version of the American Red Cross – was in the process of removing the display of the Magen David symbol on its ambulances operating over the Green Line as a sop to the International Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent, which are averse to the display of the Jewish symbol there.
We do not mean to denigrate the impressive military support and cooperation the Obama administration has directed toward Israel.
We applaud the passage by the New York State Legislature of the Iran Divestment Act of 2012.
We thought the outrageous incident involving an eight-year-old child being spat on by a haredi man because he didn't think she was modestly dressed was about as over the top as one could get.
It is hard to make much sense out of the recent military threats Iran has been aiming at the West and the U.S. in particular.
It would appear that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's vocal support for the Ground Zero mosque – not only did he come out in favor of it, he labeled opponents as un-American – is coming back to haunt him. Some leaders of New York's Muslim community apparently believe he will bend over backward to accommodate their concerns, however wrongheaded.
November 6, 2026 
