יום שלישי, ט״ז חשוון תשפ״זTuesday, October 27, 2026
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Natan Sharansky warned what happens when the self is asked to dissolve to be free, “When Jews abandon identity in the pursuit of universal freedom, they end up with neither.”
Most of the 38 parties registered this time around have no chance of getting anywhere near the Knesset unless they sign up for a tour of the building.
For Jewish New Yorkers, the election is a chance to examine what each candidate proposes to do about the issues that affect their families, institutions, and communities.
I had been to Ein Gedi and Masada before – these are classic tiyulim for a visit in Israel – but it was over twenty years ago, and there have been some changes, both to these sites and to my own perspective.
Imagine the Almighty looking at Ireland for example. Seeing the Jew hatred of that particular people, it’s easy to imagine Heaven having thoughts about the necessity of them having a reset.
Part of why he could tell me, I think, is that I was nobody to him. My kids weren't in class with his, and I wasn't going to be at the kiddush. There was no role between us for the truth to damage.
By framing the current state of affairs as a victory for economic strangulation we think he was signaling that his full-court economic press against Iran is achieving its ultimate objective without requiring a new round of American missiles.
The October 15 rules supply the teeth. So, the kind of sanctions machinery Western capitals refined against Russia and Iran has now been aimed at a democratically fighting a multi-front war.
Most of the 38 parties registered this time around have no chance of getting anywhere near the Knesset unless they sign up for a tour of the building.
Complacency has helped bring us to this stage of antisemitism. Now is your chance to reverse it. VOTE!
It is not just about the competing dates, but also a more general issue: no clear ritual or symbol has emerged to mark the day.
By Ita Yankovich and Ziona Greenwald
Shinkle, a Manhattan native, says she has no choice: “I will not leave the future of the center of Western Civilization, New York City, in the hands of incompetent hacks.”
If October 7 was not a beginning, then it must have been a response. But a response to what?
Wiesel’s Son and Protégé, Elisha, Speaks Out on the Nobel Committee’s Ignoble Move
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “In Israel, and only there, Jews can walk where the prophets walked, climb the mountains Avraham climbed, lift their eyes to the hills that David saw, and continue the story their ancestors began.”
The sheer audacity and deadliness of recent Houthi strikes completely puncture the illusion of safety the alliance was meant to provide.
Every challenger promises to lower taxes and ensure safer streets. Bruce Blakeman has already delivered them in a county where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly 100,000.
In our brief conversation, he asked both me and Chana about what we were doing this year in Jerusalem, having come from the U.S. It was a lovely highlight of our chag to have the opportunity to meet the President!
Assessing a Newly Presented Argument Introduction "More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews." Ahad Ha'am, a secular Jew, was speaking of Shabbat's role in preserving Jewish life. For those who observe it, that protection is also spiritual: Shabbat gives us time to step back from daily demands and […]
By Our Readers
Parsing the Mysteries of Moshiach’s Identity Last week, we published a letter by reader Rafi Hagler about Chaim Yehuda Meyer’s interview with Rabbi Aharon Yaakov Lieberman, “Who Can Be Moshiach?” (Sept. 25). The letter-writer questioned how the view of Bar Kochba as the potential Redeemer – by no less than Rabbi Akiva – squares with […]
Political critique of any foreign state is entirely fair game in a democracy, but the repeated use of hyper-charged, unsubstantiated buzzwords – like “genocide” or “apartheid” – serves to demonize a core element of mainstream Jewish identity and heritage connected to the Land of Israel.
Not only is Yom Tov a day off, but Chol HaMoed is generally a day off as well. Okay, maybe you don’t get a full week off before Pesach and Sukkos like the schools do (which creates its own set of problems), but the work calendar is organized around the Jewish calendar.
While Mamdani eventually conceded that his administration lacked the independent legal authority to carry out such an arrest, his rhetoric plainly set the stage for an explosive week of demonstrations.
Netanyahu’s fiery remarks – both on social media and at the UNGA – did not emerge from a vacuum. He gave voice to what millions of Jewish New Yorkers have felt since Mamdani assumed office: a palpable, terrifying shift in their safety in their own city.
A family considering aliyah often lists what will be lost, ease of language, a career ladder already climbed, the familiar aisle in a supermarket. Those losses are real. What is gained is harder to put on a spreadsheet.
He has also produced dozens of other songs, including several released very recently that he played for us. This is an up-and-coming singer at the height of his creativity.
The governor has once again resorted to the oldest trick in the political playbook: handing out nominal one-time checks just before voters head to the ballot box.
Sukkot is the only pilgrimage festival that doesn’t commemorate a major historical event. Instead, it marks a paradox: G-d protected us in fragile huts during the most destabilizing period of Jewish history, our forty-year wilderness journey.
For seven days a person makes the sukkah his keva and his house arai. Meals move outside. So do learning, conversation, sitting around, and, when weather and circumstances allow, sleeping. That is an unusual form for a mitzvah.
The message is clear: in modern New York, political grandstanding for woke jail reform supersedes basic human decency for victims of violence.
There is a kind of shame that can feel morally serious because it refuses to let us off the hook, and we are right to be suspicious of anything that seems to soften responsibility.
As much as one might have closely followed Israeli news over the past three years, even if one knows people who were killed (as I unfortunately do), there is a difference between spending the past three years in Teaneck and experiencing them in Israel, among the communities that have experienced so much loss.
A total Jewish experience includes the parts that do not photograph well. Army service for those called, coalition politics that embarrass, neighbors who vote differently and still sit in the same shelter.
Having previously, unsuccessfully attempted to arrest Netanyahu for bogus “genocide” crimes and more recently encouraging public demonstrations against the visiting leader, the mayor now faces a critical test of governance: ensuring that his hateful words do not translate into urban chaos.
The Houthis have now learned that firing on ships, on Saudi oil, and on Israeli cities produces negotiations rather than consequences.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put the difference without ornament: “In Israel Judaism is part of the public square, not just the private, sequestered space of synagogue, school and home.” The sentence is descriptive, not promotional.
We’re multifaceted people, with inclinations and inner drives toward spirituality and goodness as well as toward physicality and the opposite of goodness. This doesn’t mean that either drive is entirely positive or entirely negative on its own, but rather, we need to channel both these drives toward G-dliness.
In Israel, as opposed to America, Jewish education is run through the government. There are various religious public schools, which are government-funded, and then there are private schools, which are… also primarily government-funded.
A prominent, qualified Jewish jurist is blacklisted from public service for performing his constitutional duty to provide legal defense, while the mayor’s own Muslim chief counsel is handed a sacred legal piece of 9/11 memorabilia despite having defended a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist.
Most of us walk into Rosh Hashanah with a list. Be more patient. Put the phone down at dinner. Daven like I mean it... The items are usually accurate. Someone has thought honestly about where his life is lacking. What a list cannot tell you is who will be keeping it in Cheshvan, when the person who wrote it and the person living that particular Tuesday afternoon are barely on speaking terms.
Of course, as is so often the case when a truly antisemitic line is being crossed, it is a Jew who makes the announcement. On this occasion that Jew is called Ed Miliband who recently became Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
The premise of Washington’s current strategy against Iran relies on financial suffocation.
A positive case for living in Israel today does not depend on dark forecasts about anywhere else. It depends on the simple claim that a home of hope should be lived in by those who can.
Think of someone who has told you more than once that he will be there, and then wasn't. At some point another passionate assurance does nothing at all.
The idea of hundreds, if not thousands, of people gathering together in preparation for the Yamim Noraim – not as a shul program, but as a much larger convocation – reminded me of Yishay Ribo's huge performances at Madison Square Garden in 2023 and 2024. There were, of course, some differences.
The mayor’s glowing sympathy for a violent sociopath – and his chilling silence regarding the innocent victim – is not just a political gaffe. It is a defining feature of an ideological worldview that consistently elevates the welfare of criminals above the safety of law-abiding citizens.
The minister explicitly contextualized these harsh standards by drawing a parallel to Israeli hostages who hardly enjoyed any basic rights.
when the targets are Jewish, the rules routinely shift. By introducing “context” about the attacker’s grievances immediately following the assault, El-Sayed explicitly connected the actions of a foreign government to a local community of American Jews.
There are years when something opens. Davening feels different. A shofar blast catches us off guard. We become more reflective, more aware of the gap between who we are and who we want to be.
The only way to ensure that tedium does not prevail is to be able to see the positives outweighing the negatives.
Erdogan’s Turkey is an authoritarian Islamist power pursuing regional dominance under a neo-Ottoman banner, using NATO membership as armor while working against the interests the alliance exists to protect.
In retrospect, it is hard to understand why anyone would think that Israel would not act to derail Turkey’s plans by any means necessary, given that they are so inimical to Israel’s security interests and so provocative.
The city is a creation of the state, and the state holds the ultimate leverage. But Mayor Mamdani seems to be operating under the delusion that he has a mandate to run an independent city-state, prioritizing a post-colonial foreign policy over real city issues.
In fact, the mayor’s statement was not only a robotic recitation of political talking points, which it most certainly was, but it also contributed to the problem.
The most glaring flaw in Washington’s new strategy is the sheer financial asymmetry of the battlefield.
By Jessica Russak-Hoffman and Menachem Wecker - JNS
Muslims are estimated to make up about 1% of Americans, suggesting that in 2025, a Jewish American was about 190% likelier than a Muslim American to be the target of a hate crime.
Somehow, American consumer culture, combined with the suburban lifestyle and affordances, has led to a culture of accumulation.
I expect to use this column to illuminate some of the more exciting cultural, religious, and national phenomena that are taking place in Israel, but also to do so from my personal (and American) perspective.
The regime’s leadership in Tehran has survived the wreckage of the 2026 conflict and concluded that their ultimate weapon of survival is no longer just their nuclear stockpile – it is their absolute, extortionary grip on the Strait of Hormuz.
It does not reject galus. It recognizes that this particular galus is a constitutional democracy that gives religious minorities lawful tools to protect themselves.
Offensively, Israel’s grand strategy for the post-war Middle East relied heavily on getting Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords.
The administration’s aggressive approach goes beyond mere recruitment; it includes active ideological gatekeeping.
The Gulf states and others similarly threatened by Iranian oil blackmail are demonstrating that the best defense is not merely a naval response but infrastructural independence.
Because New York City seems destined to have a mayor with an obsessive ideological focus on Israel, a restraining offset in the state house in Albany is essential. Sadly, Governor Hochul has shown that she is not up to the task. In fact, she has emerged as an enabler of the mayor and his excesses.
Israel – a Jewish state standing alone in a sea of nations that would erase it – is not the crime you make it out to be. It is what a people builds when it refuses to disappear.
Each new breakdown reinforces the same conclusion: making agreements with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas has too often proven to be a fool's errand, as commitments give way to renewed conflict and broken promises.
An hour in which nothing has to be managed, where the worst of it can be said out loud and the person hearing it neither flinches nor leaves, does something no technique accounts for.
The most immediate damage came from Vance’s rhetoric regarding the recent U.S.-Iran ceasefire. Rather than simply defending the administration’s diplomatic efforts, Vance chose to portray Israel as a malicious actor actively trying to subvert American foreign policy.
Mamdani’s antics have moved things from the realm of political theater into dangerous legal fiction.
By Marc Gronich
New Measures to Address Gun Violence in N.Y. The past several weeks have been particularly busy in government and politics. Two examples: June saw the celebration of Dairy Month and Gun Violence Awareness Month, even though state residents are well aware that gun violence is on the rise in the state. Dairy Month was celebrated […]
The current crisis was enabled by the structural failures of the Islamabad Memorandum itself. The United States committed the cardinal sin of international negotiation: we surrendered our leverage before the adversary surrendered their weapons.
This structure shapes the incentives of the Torah heirs. If they accept the distribution outlined in the civil will, the obligation is waived and the estate is divided accordingly.
The much-touted Gaza governance transition is not a roadmap for peace; it is a calculated diplomatic smoke screen to mask an indefinite, occupation-by-proxy and defer the political realities of the conflict.
These days the show regularly traffics in the genocide-hoax. Not by Lehrer himself, who hastens to add that proponents of Israel disagree with that labeling, but by very many of his guests.
When parents seek an intensive Jewish education for their children, we hand them a tuition bill that can exceed the cost of college. Something is wrong with this picture.
By Chaim Saiman
I was initially perplexed as to why the specific location loomed so large; surely Humboldt has many suitable lecture halls. But the significance of Humboldt’s elegant nineteenth-century Senate House became clear as I was being introduced at the event.
From the land mines and border infiltrations of the 1950s, to the suicide bombings of the 2000s, to the slaughter of October 7, 2023, Palestinian Arab terrorism has made a deliberate science of murdering civilians.
It is impossible to look honestly at such sacrifice and claim that military service and greatness in Torah are incompatible.
It is an endless cycle of self-righteous grievance. And while Republicans are busy writing angry tweets about the Marxist takeover of American cities, the progressive left is busy doing the one thing that actually matters: banking votes.
Political extremism rarely emerges in a vacuum. People turn to radical solutions after years of watching institutions disappoint them and their economic opportunities grow increasingly out of reach.
In a staggering display of political hubris, Mamdani hijacked what should have been a moment of transcendent national unity to deliver a deeply divisive, progressive grievance lecture.
Israel already existed when that vote was taken. Not yet as a sovereign state – that would come the following May – but as the living substance of a nation: its land, its cities, its farms, its schools, its university, its courts, and its militia and underground armies.
A central halachic and emotional theme of the day is to avoid diverting our minds from this national mourning.
There is a unique grief that belongs to an in-law child. It sits quietly in the back seat, in the shadows; it knows its place.
October 23, 2026 
