יום רביעי, ט׳ תמוז תשפ״וWednesday, June 24, 2026
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There are those prepared to go as far as suggesting that the kidnappings are perhaps understandable and the victims at least somewhat at fault.
But while the new development hardly augurs well for Israel, the consequences to America may be even more troublesome.
Adherence to the Torah is the only thing that has sustained Jews through the ages.
Since the end of World War II it has become increasingly clear that if the United States is to be a force for international order and peaceful coexistence, it cannot rely on massive military power to impose its will.
It has long been clear to us that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is not prepared to negotiate with Israel if it means he’d have to make meaningful concessions.
Last Friday, Iranian officials claimed the West was making “excessive demands” and cautioned that “The Iranian nation has shown that pressure…always backfires.”
AIPAC’s dominion – reinforced by Christian Zionists and the usual cast of neocon hawks – is destructive on many fronts.
There is an interesting parallel here with the timing and details of another political scandal.
Taking their cue from Democratic allegations of a politically motivated “witch hunt,” mainstream media types are spinning the work of the new committee in terms of the attack itself and our apparent lack of preparedness.
Of particular interest to us is the friend-of- the-court brief submitted by the noted constitutional lawyer Nathan Lewin in support of allowing the opening prayers.
Since its founding in 2008, J Street has consistently argued that Israel’s failure to make ever greater concessions to the Palestinians is responsible for the failure of negotiations with the Palestinians.
To be sure, we have been troubled over the years by some policies adopted by Israeli governments, but we do not deem them as defining.
We can only wonder why Mr. Kerry would seek to embed the notion of Israel as potentially an apartheid state in the thinking of a group of international opinion makers.
Israel, the U.S. and the European Union all maintain that Hamas cannot be part of any negotiations unless it changes its fundamental opposition to the existence of Israel.
NIF support for BDS groups, writes Black, also included acting as a “go between for other donors….
Brandeis, which had to have known about her record of criticism of Islam, pulled the honor after pressure from a Muslim advocacy group and a number of faculty members and students.
It’s finally happened. New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan reported on her blog that “many readers...wrote to object to an [April 2] article…on the breakdown in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians,” claiming “[they] found the headline misleading and the article itself lacking in context.” Ms. Sullivan provided one such letter, quoted the […]
Nor did it seem relevant that according to widely circulated media reports, Rev. Sharpton was caught on an FBI surveillance video discussing possible drug sales with an FBI agent.
To be sure, American policy had long opposed the growth of Israeli settlements, but at the same time U.S. policymakers acknowledged that in any negotiated agreement there would be land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians to accommodate the large numbers of Israelis living in the settlements.
The issue of affordable infertility treatment has long been one of particular importance to the Orthodox Jewish community and we support the leadership of New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who again successfully championed this significant cause.
So it always struck us as hypocritical that Israel was expected to release cold-blooded killers almost as a matter of habit while the U.S. balked at letting Pollard go.
The Department of Justice acknowledges that individuals can claim an exemption if they can demonstrate an adverse impact on their religious beliefs.
In the larger sense, Mrs. Lubling came to epitomize an Orthodox community dedicated to taking care of its own.
There may not have been much else President Obama could have realistically done, but the headline writers at the Times obviously felt the need to massage a front-page story that took a less than giddy approach to Mr. Obama’s policymaking; how else to explain the story’s headline – “As Sanctions Start, Russia Feels a Sting”?
Testifying before the House Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry said: “I think it's a mistake for some people to be raising it again and again as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a state, and peace, and we’ve obviously made that clear.”
The Jewish Press supported the “Orthodox Hebrew” standard since it at least purported to provide protection for the entire kashrut-observant community while a non-Orthodox standard would be misleading to the Orthodox. The courts, however, ruled otherwise and invalidated the Orthodox Hebrew standard as the prerequisite for referring to food as kosher.
There are those who believe all Israelis must share equally in the military defense of Israel while others say Torah study affords at least as much security as military service. In many respects, The Jewish Press has long reflected this dynamic.
Mr. Obama’s latest “amendment” of the Obamacare law, however, has elevated the arrogation of legislative power to an art form. And he has done so for blatantly political reasons.
One can almost imagine a shocked Mr. Kerry thinking to himself, “How could he?” Yet not only did Mr. Putin do what he did, China, one of the three major international players along with the U.S. and Russia, agreed with him, not with Mr. Kerry.
Ramaz is a venerable Modern Orthodox educational institution whose mission statement contains the explicit commitment to “Ahavat Yisrael, and love and support for the State of Israel.”
We are not unmindful that generally appropriate governmental initiatives may have some inappropriate aspects in execution.
Al Qaeda, despite President Obama’s claims to the contrary, is newly resurgent and no doubt salivating at the prospect of a severely diminished U.S. military capacity.
Last month, after the Israeli government published plans for new construction, the State Department promptly repeated its longstanding refrain that the settlements were “illegitimate” and that “It is never helpful to have steps taken that are not conducive to our efforts to move forward on peace.”
While the thrust of the proposed law is easily understandable, there is a problem as well. The current draft requires claimants to prove malicious intent on the part of the present holder of the property, which some legal authorities say would be extremely difficult.
Recent stories in the Israeli media, citing “unnamed sources,” indicate that Mr. Kerry failed to get backing from President Obama to confront Israel over its rejection of his peace proposals
For us, the key factor is that support in Congress for new sanctions has collapsed in the face of the president’s blandishments.
This week Rabbi Hershel Schachter, one of the most prominent roshei yeshiva of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, not only issued a stinging rebuke of the practice of women wearing tefillin but also the process by which such decisions are made.
It’s no secret that many in the academic community support boycotts as a means of pressuring and punishing Israel. So it’s understandable that proposed legislation to prohibit use of public funds to promote boycotts – authored by New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and now being considered by the Assembly – has created an uproar. An identical bill was passed last week by the State Senate.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference about what he saw as the dangers inherent in the failure of Israeli-Palestinian talks, Mr. Kerry said: “The risks are high for Israel. People are talking about boycott. That will intensify in the case of failure. Do they want a failure that then begs whatever may come in the form of a response from disappointed Palestinians and the Arab community?”
The brief informed the court that though “the Jewish faith does not prohibit the financing of contraception,” the legal position taken by the administration threatens to curtail religious observances by American Jews inasmuch as Jewish law does not distinguish between and among different forms of business ownership.
There is an ever-widening schism among Modern Orthodox Jews.
The NPI ranks countries in terms of their ability to influence global events. The ranking is based on a statistical comparative analysis of a country’s economy, military, diplomacy, technology, and population.
The Times reported that American influence “has ebbed” following Syrian President Assad’s defiance of American demands that he step down and al Qaeda’s significant military successes in Iraq.
The furor over the New York Post’s outrageous coverage of the murder of Menachem Stark, including its repeated and irrelevant references to Mr. Stark’s being a chassidic Jew, focused the community’s attention on that particular story. But similar things regularly slip under the radar.
On January 5 it was reported that Secretary of State Kerry had said, “Could [Iran] contribute from the sidelines? Are there ways for them, conceivably to weigh in?…. It may be that there are ways that could happen. But that has to be determined by the [UN] secretary-general. It has to be determined by Iranian intentions themselves. We are happy to have Iran be helpful.”
It is the mark of Ariel Sharon that in death the glowing tributes to his military prowess were not the manufactured puffery that usually infuses these exercises. To be sure, there were the usual critics along the way making relatively minor points. But he really was the fearless, innovative, consummate military leader and defender of Israel everyone is talking about.
On January 1 The New York Times headlined a lengthy news story on the Palestinian refusal to consider recognition of Israel as a Jewish state in the following fashion: “Sticking Point in Peace Talks: Recognition of a Jewish State.”
Plainly, the Post was not interested in simply telling the story of a horrific murder, which was, after all, the subject at hand. Indeed, the overall tone of the coverage suggested Stark was the victim not of assassins but of some form of rough justice.
Several months ago the U.S. reluctantly acceded to the request of President Hamid Karzai and turned over custody of the detainees to Afghan authorities but with a warning that if they were subsequently released – especially those with American blood on their hands – it could torpedo negotiations for a long term security agreement with the U.S.
Despite our dismay over much of the rhetoric that abounded during Bill de Blasio’s inauguration ceremony as New York City’s new mayor last week, we nevertheless stand by our endorsement in the November 5 election.
It had long seemed that the movement to boycott Israel, particularly its colleges and universities, was unstoppable. Almost every week brought news of some fresh resolution according pariah-like status to Israel, ostensibly in response to Israel’s alleged trampling on the rights of Palestinians – though it was easy to suspect something more insidious and deep-rooted at play.
The New York Times, in a front-page story last week about its investigation into what really happened in the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi last year, purported to debunk the accepted wisdom concerning the incident.
We were struck by the widespread criticism of Israel’s intention to officially announce new settlement construction even as it authorized the release of 26 more Palestinian terrorists as a “confidence building” measure designed to please the Palestinians.
President Obama’s departure for his Hawaiian vacation the other day reminded us of the chaotic scene at the end of the Vietnam War when desperate American military and civilian personnel were extricated from Saigon by hovering helicopters while surging North Vietnamese troops, pressing forward with their encirclement of Saigon, were mere yards away.
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.
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.
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.
June 21, 2026 
