In our annual progression through the Torah, we are now deep into slavery in Egypt. And each year, around this time, as I read the first Torah portions in Exodus, the same thought occurs to me: Why is all this necessary? By the end of Jacob’s life, he’s back in the Land of Israel, the land God has given him and his progeny. Why must ...
Why did Donald Trump decide last Friday to temporarily ban immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and suspend all refugee admissions for 120 days? It all goes back to the war in Iraq. For the last few years, the establishment conservative answer for why America lost the Iraq War has been: Barack Obama. George W. Bush’s “surge” had belatedly won the war, the argument goes, until ...
When the mass violence starts, and some Israeli Jews die, and many more huddle in bomb shelters, I won’t write a column like this. I won’t write a column like this because when Jewish blood flows, it changes the conversation. American Jews became less tolerant of criticism of Israel. And I feel less comfortable offering it. When the next intifada begins, I’ll write more cautiously ...
Inaugural addresses are, in part, catechisms. The new president signals that he’ll take the country in a new direction. But he casts that new direction as consistent with old and cherished national principles, from which the country has strayed, and to which it must return. Since Woodrow Wilson, and certainly Franklin Roosevelt, part of the catechism has been America’s mission to defend freedom around the ...
If there’s one thing conservatives hate, it’s “identity politics”: the claim that membership in a particular ethnic, racial or gender group gives someone special authority over policy toward that group. Tell conservatives that women should make abortion policy, or Latinos should make immigration policy, or African Americans should decide whether affirmative action is fair, and they’ll howl. So how do conservatives feel when Jews — ...
In the decades to come, historians of American Jewry will ask how a community that keenly remembers its own experience with state bigotry produced institutions that excused the most nakedly bigoted major party presidential nominee in modern American history. They will ask why the crowd at the policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee gave Donald Trump a standing ovation just three months ...
Last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued two public statements. When the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution criticizing settlements, Netanyahu attacked it for not condemning Syria. When Secretary of State John Kerry defended the Obama administration’s decision to let the resolution pass, Netanyahu attacked him for not sufficiently condemning the Palestinians. In both responses, the Israeli leader illustrated George Orwell’s famous insight: The ...
Monday’s horrors—the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin and the assassination of a Russian diplomat in Ankara—offer a natural experiment. Since they occurred during the brief window every four or eight years in which America has both a president and a president-elect, they provoked two sets of statements, one from the outgoing administration and another from its soon-to-be successor. The differences are revealing. ...
To understand why Donald Trump chose David Friedman to be his ambassador to Israel, it’s worth reading a story written by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Uriel Heilman this April. With the New York Republican primary only days away, a group of Orthodox Jewish activists came to meet Trump at his office. According to Heilman, “One of the first things Trump did when he sat down ...
A few days after Donald Trump won the presidency, my father told me a story about his childhood. …