Guests and Blogs

When the perpetrator of this act of racist and antisemitic violence was found guilty on all counts this past June, I felt a palpable sense of relief. Justice had been done and this evil human would be punished for his horrific crime. Upon hearing the news that he would be given the death penalty, however, I felt a sense of unease and trauma – similar to what I felt when I learned about his murderous act in the first place.

It is cruel irony that Israelis are preparing to move to Germany or Poland where their parents or grandparents survived Hitler.

I’m writing to provide some background for the situation in which Rep. Jamila Jayapal characterized Israel as a “racist state.” And to comment on media misrepresentation of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

We all know what brought this on. The resolution targeted Jayapal for labeling Israel a “racist state” when she addressed the liberal Netroots Nation in Chicago on the previous Saturday night. On Sunday, her fellow Democrats protested, prompting Jayapal to revise her original remarks.

In The Philadelphia Inquirer’s food section, a Palestinian chef opened up a whole new front…quite an unappetizing one…in the propaganda wars over Israel.

I thought BJN readers might be interested in the history surrounding the “refugee” situation that Richard Sherman discussed in his letter ("Letter: The Antisemitic Perversion of “Palestinian Refugee”", BJN 7/14/23).

Of 12 Palestinians killed in Israel’s in Jenin the other week, at least four were under 18, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, according to The New York Times. Terrorist groups claimed that at least five of those killed were fighters, including a 16-year-old boy. Israel said that all Palestinian fatalities were combatants.

For nearly two decades the mainstream media has written about "Palestinian refugees" to describe the millions of Arabs living in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

The gunman’s six words, as alleged during his trial, were both dreadful and predictable: “All these Jews need to die.”

Almost immediately I shuddered when I switched on the television Wednesday night last week and learned that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff was censured by the House of Representatives. I felt as if I was watching a replay of the trials of Alfred Dreyfus and Leo Frank.

Perhaps the saddest point about a CUNY law student using her invitation to address her fellow graduates (Column: New York Times Compounds Harm Of ‘Fiery Speech’ That Bashes Israel Boulder Jewish News June 22, 2023) was that many in the audience probably didn’t know enough about the history of the modern State of Israel to challenge the speaker, even if there had been an opportunity for them to do so.

If a reader can find the Times article, they must wade through one-third of the piece before getting a blurry idea of what the “fiery speech” is about and what “embers” are being fanned by whom.

Guess what an organization should do if a supervisor repeatedly humiliates and bullies a Jewish subordinate in the course of joking about Jews who were exterminated in Nazi death camps. Not in the Canadian army.

Notwithstanding the praise that some Jewish organizations have heaped on the Biden White House's recent plan to fight antisemitism ("U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism"), the facts -- for at least two reasons -- demonstrate that this plan is toothless. 

Pittsburgh’s Jewish community is currently forced to relive the murders of 11 members of three congregations who gathered to worship at Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, and  the experience is obviously most traumatic for surviving victims who testified at the alleged gunman’s trial.

By his own standards, President Biden undermined his expansive project to confront antisemitism in America that he introduced Wednesday last week, and 15 days before that he ignored an opportunity to directly take on an act that threatens the Jewish community.

I must disagree with the members of the Rabbinic Council. The Israeli Supreme Court and the Knesset do not currently serve as a check and balance on each other. As things stand now, the Court is clearly in control.

Two antisemitic thugs in London and Boca Raton, Fla., picked on Jewish targets their own size to badger, as disgusting as these attacks are. However, two of their confederates chose Jewish schoolchildren outside a religious school in north London to blare a Hezbollah battle song from their car.

The Rabbinic Council of Boulder is entitled to its opinion, but it ignores the fact that a fair democratic election was held in Israel. ("The Rabbinic Council of Boulder Aligns Itself With Israel's Protestors Against Judicial Reform," BJN 5/9/23). The majority, albeit a small majority, voted for the Netanyahu coalition whose platform included judicial reform. 

Once upon a time in America, Israel’s existence was held in as much high esteem as motherhood and apple pie. Even today, what reasonable person here would not want to stamp out antisemitism?

A recent New York Times feature about a troubled World War II veteran has inadvertently shed fresh light on the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz. The story also implicitly undermines one of the major themes of the recent Ken Burns documentary about America’s response to the Nazi genocide.

“They love him in Israel.” Do they love him in Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach, the main cities and their suburbs where most Florida Jews live? Or, for that matter, Floridians generally who live in those areas?

or President Lawrence Bacow and Harvard University today,  it is a truly shameful deja vu all over again as  Harvard has embarked on an attempt to awash itself again  -- as it did with numerous Nazi universities  -- with those who celebrate antisemitism -- specifically Al-Quds University near Jerusalem. 

The shock value of the spectacle that General Dwight D. Eisenhower witnessed at the Ohrdruf concentration camp on April 12, 1945, is now being revived on a smaller scale with the Tree of Life trial and a grisly attack in Las Vegas.

The news of three teens' recent rock throwing highway spree, ("Three men arrested in connection with fatal rock-throwing spree", Daily Camera 4/26/23) that killed one young driver, surely shocked Coloradans and many others around the nation.