יום חמישי, י״ח חשוון תשפ״זThursday, October 29, 2026
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Talk of “shared responsibility” with the Jewish state distracts from the real threat to U.S. Jews from leftists who are motivated by Jew-hatred, not Netanyahu and his allies.
As we fought a just war against those who attacked us, we faced fierce condemnation and spurious accusations of terrible crimes.
The pressure takes many forms: a venue suddenly becomes unavailable; a school threatens a family; a shadchan refuses to arrange matches; a rabbi is warned to stay silent. At times, even prominent rabbanim are physically attacked, and their homes or institutions vandalized. The message is clear: even attending a private discussion can come at a cost.
Whoever briefed the comptroller on Israel’s risk stopped the clock somewhere in 2024.
Behind a revolt characterized by looting, arson, stone-throwing, injuries and the destruction of shops and public institutions lies another reality: the imperative of conquest that Islamism does not conceal as one of its goals.
By Justin Engel
It seems so bizarre that we’ve been reduced, in many ways, to clichés and catchphrases: If you see something, say something; trust your gut; better safe than sorry. Yet, here we are, in 2026.
Evidently, Hashem implanted within the Jewish soul an instinctive attachment to its homeland. He gave us the ability to respond to the pull of land, peoplehood, and historical destiny even without religious commitment or prophetic revelation.
You might be thinking: “This is all very interesting, but I’ve never gone on Har HaBayis before and I’m not going to start now – why should I?”
Only the Israelis could behave like this – regular people displaying raw courage, heroism and the lion-hearted, can-do Israeli spirit.
Theories abound as to why Rubio has virtually vanished from center stage.
But the reason it has no definition, no protest section and no word on the economic targeting of Israel is that each would implicate the mayor.
Rav Sacks taught that Judaism cannot be limited to a private relationship with G-d or protecting one's own community. “The Jewish question is not, ‘What can the world give me?’” he wrote. “It is, ‘What can I give to the world?’ Judaism is G-d’s call to responsibility.”
Simchat Torah teaches us that every ending creates the possibility for a new beginning and the same is true in business, where an apparent dead end can sometimes prepare an organization for its next chapter.
Modern Orthodox Torah study, in too many of its institutional forms, has no clear telos, or purpose, at all. It tries to be both things at once – serious Torah learning and serious general education – and in the attempt it often becomes neither.
I like making lists. I entered Yom Kippur with a list of kabbalos I hoped to undertake, and as the day unfolded, I pared that list down to the few I could realistically maintain.
So much of Jewish life happens inside its walls. At its core, though, the shul is where we come together primarily to do two things: to daven and to learn Torah.
This is one of the fundamental messages of Yom Kippur: We are responsible, and we are capable of choosing.
We witness antisemitism, hatred, violence, and terror. Yet our enemies misunderstand the source of Jewish survival.
The Cold War made such fears part of the public consciousness. Americans grew up expecting that nuclear destruction, if it came, might arrive by Soviet bomber or missile. Yet the possibility that civilian aircraft already flying inside the country could be seized and turned against American cities belonged mostly to fiction.
Our dichotomous nature is at the very core of what it means to be human. To be human means to live suspended between the Earth’s gravity and Heaven’s gentle tug.
For years, we had allowed ourselves to become bitterly divided. Israelis increasingly saw those on the other side of the political or religious divide not simply as mistaken, but as enemies. Then, within hours of the attack, those divisions became irrelevant.
This week, we will read the victims’ names and repeat the promise: Never forget. But we should also ask: Twenty-five years later, what became of the enemy?
A political party creates more than legislation. It determines whom a community regards as worthy of representation.
'Bartov also suggested that he insists on using the term ‘genocide’ in debates not because it is legally accurate but because it is rhetorically necessary.'
Four nations, four entirely different temperaments, and one thing in common. Every one of them reaches for its finest hour, or its highest hope, and sets that to music.
Raskin, like the academics who made anti-Zionism (indistinguishable from antisemitism) the new orthodoxy throughout American education and culture, thinks colleges and universities should be free to create hostile environments for Jews on their campuses.
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.
By Alan Zeitlin
Stoudemire said that his interest in Torah was private for many years. “At the end of it all, I wanted to go back to a place where I had a special connection to. I was learning for 20 years prior – secretly, I was learning Torah,” he said.
Someone eats the forbidden cheeseburger and later says, “It was not worth it.” That is something. But what exactly was not worth it? The price? The guilt? The indigestion? The disappointment? If so, then the regret still revolves around the person’s own experience.
None of us has access to the Ribbono Shel Olam’s accounting, and people who confidently assign reasons for suffering generally reveal more about themselves than about the ways of Hashem.
For decades, advocates of the so-called two-state solution have maintained that any new Palestinian state would be demilitarized. The phrase is reassuring – and hollow.
Every speaker, friend, and relative apologized for not having understood how much Will had been suffering, for not having been able to console him or to help him find the help that he needed.
By Jack Simony
Why Jews hear certain political arguments differently and what political leaders can learn from it.
By Yigal Gross
I am a Zionist because I believe history and geography are inextricably linked. Jewish history did not simply happen to occur in the Land of Israel; it unfolded because of it.
This conflict can only be resolved if the parties directly involved engage in appropriate, honest, and very difficult dialogue, which at the moment doesn’t seem likely.
By Tom Czitron
Global capital that ignored Israel for years is starting to take it seriously as a market, not a charity case. That’s a different kind of commitment than what most of us have given Israel in the past.
By the report’s reckoning, well over two million Israelis live within a single October 7 radius of a military force that isn’t supposed to exist. And that is only the threat on which the report focuses.
By Ava Schwartz
The shul mentors are handpicked, trained, and professionally supported so they can accompany and support boys and girls who would otherwise sit alone or simply stay home.
By Yigal Gross
We have gotten remarkably good at playing defense. And we have mistaken that skill for advocacy.
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.
When Zohran Mamdani won the mayoralty, many New Yorkers who had not voted for him responded with a shrug. He had won – but how much difference could one mayor really make? More than a half-year into his administration, the answer is clear: a great deal. Far from an ideological curiosity confined to City Hall, […]
Stories like that of Yunes remind us that even amid unimaginable evil, even within the story of a murderous rampage, extraordinary goodness still exists.
The race for New York's 12th Congressional District is about more than party politics. It is a choice about whether one of America's largest Jewish communities will have a representative who will stand unequivocally against antisemitism.
By Avi Woolf
Morning prayer services cannot begin until after sunrise, making it impossible for people to attend prayer services and get to work and school on time.
The Jewish holidays – every one of them – are inextricably bound to Jerusalem and its Holy Temple.
People don’t generally erupt in cheers at the end of a brit milah. But after such a long journey, what else could we do other than join in a round of communal elation?
What do Communists, Nazis, and Islamists have in common?... They agree on almost nothing else. Their creeds of race, religion, and government are mutually exclusive. Yet all three share an aim: Israel's annihilation.
Through Chassidic teachings and timeless wisdom, this essay reveals how even our deepest collective pain can inspire healing, unity, and hope.
By Adina Broder
The antidote to the loneliness of 'Eicha yashva vadad' begins by making certain that no Jew ever feels 'Eicha esa levadi.'
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.
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.
Ever since the Hamas-led October 7 terrorist invasion of southern Israel, the use of Holocaust inversion by enemies of Israel went from being used only by pariahs to becoming chic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is not widely known that Netanyahu was a hero long before he commanded the Entebbe operation. He played a key role in many crucial Israeli security operations, exhibiting courage and valor in the most dangerous of circumstances.
By Max Wisotsky
America had been looked on by Jews as a "goldene medina," but that sentiment is now wavering.
By Jonah Halper
Many fundraisers struggle to build lasting donor relationships and feel as though they are constantly chasing donors. Often, what separates them from those who succeed is the ability to reveal the emotional truth of the mission in a way the donor can feel.
Aliyah is not only about leaving. It is also about carrying. And there are gifts from chutz la’aretz that I very much hope to bring with me.
Vance has publicly condemned antisemitism and rejected anti-Jewish hatred... Yet he has often appeared remarkably tolerant of antisemitic and anti-Israel voices when they emerge from the populist right.
By Alan Zeitlin
In Mamdani’s mind, AIPAC is a group of monsters, and someone who protested against Israel the day after October 7 is a person of conviction. Yes, it is madness, but it is working.
Stripped of slogans and emotion, his statement invites a serious historical question. If Palestine was a country, when exactly did it exist? This is no mere rhetorical trick. Countries leave records, they have governments, capitals, rulers, borders, laws, armies, currencies, and diplomatic relations.
The deal’s apparent long ceasefire also only plays into the Iranian regime’s delaying tactics. We’ve repeatedly seen that “ceasefires” with the Iranian regime and its proxies mean “we cease and they fire.”
The damage that Israel and the United States did to the Islamist terror regime was undone by an agreement that rewards Tehran and vindicates former President Barack Obama.
Russia had its own reasons for opposing a complete Iranian collapse. Moscow values Iran as both a partner and a counterweight to American influence.
Israel is not an idea I support from a safe distance. It is part of my life and my family’s story.
When struck with a crisis, I turn to the writings of America's greatest crisis manager, Abraham Lincoln.
I was surprised that the most often cited reason to interact with non-Jews was civic, political, and legal issues affecting the community.
Dan Bilzerian, who has 30 million Instagram followers, is on the ballot as a Republican in Florida’s 6th Congressional District. While he has little chance of winning, as an extremist, vulgar antisemite, his mere presence on the ballot combined with whatever percentage of the votes he will get, is jarring.
Israel has consistently maintained that the blockade exists to prevent the importation of weapons and military materiel into Hamas-controlled territory, a claim that is strongly supported by the historical evidence.
When it comes to the technologies, medical breakthroughs, surgical innovations, and companies that have most shaped modern life since the 1990s, two countries stand out above all others: the United States and Israel.
Say what you will about a demagogic politician dedicated to reviving Marxism – one of history’s bloodiest and costliest failures – as if the catastrophic events and slaughter brought on by it never happened. But on this issue, at least he wasn’t a hypocrite.
He was among the first rabbis to embrace the internet as a platform for Torah, publishing responsa as early as the 1990s. But these were not ordinary responsa. Every ruling stood behind an idea.
In the wake of the Jewish people’s collective wedding anniversary on Shavuos, I offer five dating mindsets that I’ve gleaned from those summers – for those of us still on the journey toward our chuppah, and those genuinely offering support along the way.
By Brian Romick
The United States should absolutely use its leverage to advance peace. But that leverage should not be focused solely on Israel.
Ever since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the use of Holocaust inversion by enemies of Israel has gone from being used only by pariahs to becoming chic.
With most of its primary source of revenue cut off, the question remains: How did the PLO-P.A. continue financing terror payments?
Does Gere really object to the idea of Jewish families living in areas where ancient Jewish history is everywhere to be found?
Torah speaks differently to different souls. Every Jew has a unique relationship with Torah, a unique derech in serving Hashem, and a unique contribution to make to the Jewish people.
If our personal foundation isn’t all it can be at that time, regardless of how strong our spouse’s foundation is, our future together will be shaky; our weaker qualities will ultimately reveal themselves more clearly rather than improve.
Identity, in Ruth's case, is not something preserved through careful self-protection. It is something discovered through openness – through relationships, risks, and responsiveness to the unexpected.
The modern business of antisemitism begins, like so much else in modern Europe, in Paris.
By Jeffrey Lax
Those same union delegates and officers walk into our classrooms every day. Their attitudes don’t stay behind in the (largely Marxist) union halls – they shape how they teach, what they tolerate from students, and the messages they send about who belongs in American society.
Left-leaning opposition has argued that school choice programs divert funds from and thereby harm public schools.
American Jews did not respond to that freedom by standing apart from the country. They helped build it.
The most dangerous feature of the moment isn’t merely the resurgence of antisemitism. It is its reappearance from both ends of the political spectrum, simultaneously, and with increasing intensity.
By Avi Ciment
Whether it was lies about Jews poisoning wells, spreading plagues, or killing Christian children for their blood, we have always been the target of persecution.
Rising antisemitism from both the left and right (we can argue which is worse, but there is widespread understanding that it emanates from both), fear of danger, and uncertainty about long‑term safety in the U.S.
Between Yaakov and Avraham stands Yitzchak – often the least discussed of the Avot, but nevertheless the most relevant to us.
That the injustice was later recognized – and that his name is publicly honored – reflects a society willing to confront its grave mistakes.
After I spoke at my father’s memorial and received that feedback, I knew what I had to do: I was going to write his biography. Then, I could show my family members and future generations the full picture of who their Zaidy was. They would be able to learn from him and emulate his ways.
For me, the dissemination of conversation during services had not, in the past, been so much a violation of halachic decorum, but an annoying impediment to clearly hear the ba’al tefillah and ba’al koreh enunciate each and every word.
Nobody ever started keeping Shabbos because a rock was thrown at them or because they were told that if they do not, they are a bad Jew. People embrace Shabbos because they were lovingly invited to experience it, shown its beauty, exposed to its meaning. They were invited to learn about why it is important and right for them.
For all his caution, Pius XII never suggested that it was wrong to fight Nazi Germany; rather, he operated within a long-standing Catholic moral framework that recognized the tragic necessity of war under certain conditions: the “Just War Theory,” which does not glorify violence; it constrains it.
The most powerful lesson is the indestructibility of the Jewish spark. Even when wrapped in the garments of another faith, even submerged in silence and survival, the inner chamber or essence of the Jewish soul is preserved.
The outright wrongheadedness inherent in each of these statements needs to be exposed. Not just for Israel’s well-being, but for America’s.
October 23, 2026 
