Category: Other

Like Schwartz in the old Jewish joke, you can almost picture Israel armed, alert, and diplomatically dressed waiting for the world to show up. Maybe someone will come, we think. But after this war, the wiser question isn’t who arrives, but…

The barbaric massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, strengthened the Israeli narrative that Palestinian society in its entirety is violent and murderous. On October 7, Palestinian violence did indeed reach its peak, but a…

Hostages Are Not Prisoners: The Moral Line We Must Not Blur

In today’s world of moral confusion and social media distortions, one of the most disturbing trends has been the deliberate blurring of lines between Israel’s lawful detention of…

There is no spectacle more tragic and infuriating than Jews waving Palestinian flags, chanting for “liberation,” and joining movements that would gladly erase them from the earth. We have seen this suicidal blindness before, and it ended…

Israel’s war was brutal, flawed, and human. But not genocidal. The real casualty may be our ability to tell the difference.

The war in Gaza has ended. If “ended” is the word one can ever use for a place where dust still hangs in the air…

My wife and I spent the Jewish High Holy Days of 2010 and 2012 in Poland helping Poles who had discovered their ancestors had been Jewish to return to their Jewish People.

I offer this wonderful perspective for the new Jewish year of 5786…

Introduction: The World Built on Africa

We often tell the story of the modern world — the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution — as though it was written only in Europe. Yet beneath Europe’s…

Bereishit begins with God bringing light into the void, separating day from night, shaping the earth, the sky, and all living creatures. From the very start, creation is about turning chaos into order, possibility into life, and potential…

Every year, tens of thousands of American Jews travel to Israel on trips run by Jewish organizations and programs. The impact and value of these trips is as varied as the experiences of the people taking them. For many Jewish teens and young…

The following article is based on a Drasha that I gave on the second day of Sukkot at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale – The Bayit. Please note that I have made certain changes for clarity in a written format. Additionally, I have updated…