Unconvinced By Prager
A recent New York Times story (“Political Divide Splits Relationships”) described three liberal individuals who decided to curtail their contact with Trump-supporters in their own families. It’s sad, but perhaps they had justification. Or perhaps not. Since I do not know them or their families, I would not presume to say.
Dennis Prager (“Why Are Left-Wingers Cutting Trump Voters From Their Lives?” op-ed, Dec. 9) has no such hesitation, however. He doesn’t know anything about these people, but he is absolutely certain their actions can be explained by deep characterological flaws connected with their liberalism.
These liberals, like all liberals, Mr. Prager informs us, are closed-minded and overwhelmed by their emotions. They cherish ideas more than people, demonize their opponents, devalue personal integrity, lean toward totalitarianism, attach meaning to nothing besides politics, dishonor their parents, and they are just plain mean.
This sounds awful. But even Mr. Prager must realize that these negative stereotypes could in most cases be just as easily applied to conservatives. (“They demonize their opponents! They’re closed-minded! They’re so mean!”) Unless there is some non-anecdotal evidence behind these claims, they are just empty invective.
So instead of tossing up tired stereotypes and inviting his readers to prove him wrong, why doesn’t Mr. Prager just go ahead and try to prove himself right? Let him cite the research that demonstrates that the character flaws he lists are more symptomatic of liberals than of conservatives. Otherwise, one might reasonably conclude that Mr. Prager is interested not so much in explaining liberal behavior as in simply denigrating those with whom he disagrees.
David Fass
Teaneck, NJ
Battle For The Democratic Soul
The battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is raging. And the party may be hijacked by the most radical elements within it.
Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota is the front-runner to take over the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee (DNC.) He is a left-wing extremist whose positions will alienate centrist Democrats who are having more and more trouble identifying with a party that has more in common with Louis Farrakhan than Harry Truman.
In fact, Ellison was a political ally of Louis Farrakhan, the longtime leader of the Nation of Islam. This is not guilt by association. Ellison’s recent pronouncements about Israel and its “control” of U.S. foreign policy reflect an anti-Israel – if not anti-Semitic – bias that is reprehensible.
One of Ellison’s supporters for the DNC position recently dismissed the idea of Howard Dean returning as DNC chairman, saying “We don’t need white people leading the Democratic Party right now.”
The Democratic Party would be better served – as would the people who used to proudly call themselves Democrats – by a more reasonable approach.
Brian J. Goldenfeld
Woodland Hills, CA
Truly A Queen
Re the article about his mother by Rabbi Yisroel Jungreis (The Queen Who Never Needed a Crown,” front-page essay, Dec. 9):
Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis was truly a queen who, I believe, was very likely a gilgul of the biblical Queen Esther.
Rebbetzin Jungreis was whisked by the Kastner transport out of Bergen Belsen so that she could arrive on these shores to prevent the larger remnant of Jewry from assimilating after the Holocaust. Like Queen Esther, she had a taste of the gezeira cast upon her people, having been a child of only five when she experienced death all around her. And as Queen Esther did, she too strove to prevent a holocaust of her people – in this case a spiritual holocaust.
In person, the Rebbetzin could appear every bit the diminutive Hebrew School teacher who suddenly emerged to take the Jewish world by storm in 1973, but when she took the podium to deliver words of Torah, she would be transformed into a holy figure from a bygone era.
Nobody had Rebbetzin Jungreis’s ability to mesmerize people’s souls with the truth of Torah. I often sat in the small yet elegant Hineni beis medrash tightly sandwiched between two people for the duration of her hour-plus Torah discourse and could barely feel my body.
I once related my feelings about the Rebbetzin possibly being a gilgul of Queen Esther to a naysayer in a well-known yeshiva on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who was a little too quick to retort, “Queen Esther had a Mordechai.”
When I heard that, I felt I was indeed on to something. Those who were acquainted with the Rebbetzin’s husband, HaRav Meshulem Halevi Jungreis, know that if anyone fit the depiction of a tzaddik on the level of Mordechai HaYehudi, he did. He also appeared like someone from a bygone era and, just as the biblical Mordechai was related to Queen Esther, HaRav Jungreis happened to be a distant relative of the Rebbetzin.
During the few times I heard Rabbi Jungreis speak, he would refer to Rebbetzin Jungreis as “a little girl” who was able to accomplish a great deal. He may have been trying to tell us something. Lawrence Kulak Brooklyn, NY
The Fate Of Amona
Supreme Court Or Supreme Being?
It seems surreal, to say the least, that after the traumatic expulsion of thousands of Jews from their homes in Gush Katif, the Israeli government has been ordered by the Israeli Supreme Court to destroy Amona, a so-called settlement, and to expel from their homes the brave and devoted Jewish families who have lived there for decades.
Never mind that each new expulsion only emboldens our implacable Arab enemies, whose objective is to destroy Israel.
Never mind that countless Arabs who claim Jewish homes were built on “their property” are squatters who migrated to Israel seeking employment after the Jewish state was reborn in 1948.
Never mind that no one has come forward to claim the land, except for one or two dunams out of 500, and that the granting of it to Jordanians by King Hussein was illegal.
Israel’s ill-fated decisions to destroy vibrant Jewish communities like Gush Katif and, before that, Yamit – forcefully removing so many idealistic Jews who had built their homes and their lives in good faith in Medinat Yisrael – did not bring “peace.”
Instead, such moves ignited marked increases in Arab terrorist attacks. But the justices of Israel’s Supreme Court apparently have not absorbed the lesson of the old adage “He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it.”
The Tanach, the Bible upon which Israel bases its claims of sovereignty, unequivocally teaches that God commanded Jews to settle everywhere in the land that He deeded to the Jewish people as an eternal inheritance.
The leaders of Israel should remember the long and painful history of the Jewish people. It is not secular laws, such as those espoused by Israel’s Supreme Court, but rather obedience to the Torah Laws of the Supreme Being that ultimately ensure Jewish survival.
Shifra Hoffman
(Via E-Mail)
Editor’s Note: The writer is founder of Victims of Arab Terror (www.victimsofarabterror.org) and executive director of SHUVA, the Israel emergency aliyah organization (www.shuva.net).
Reminiscent Of Gush Katif
Your Dec. 9 front-page photo highlighted the absurdity of the planned expulsion of Jewish residents from Amona by the Israeli government on the first day of Chanukah. My AFSI Chizuk mission demonstrated outside the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday morning, Nov. 13, with hundreds of children and adults from Amona, all pleading that their homes not be destroyed.