‘River way to the Sea’ These people aren’t fooling around
Jews in the West are facing a gradually unfolding witch-hunt, spurred by fanatics and zealots no less venomous than the Puritans who drove the Salem Witch Trials.
Let me make crystal clear the goals they are striving for.
•They want Western publics to regard Israel as the greatest misfortune plaguing the world today.
•They want Western publics to recognize Zionism as a political cancer as dangerous as fascism and racism (but not communism), as expressed in their slogan “Dismantle Zionism.”
•They want Western publics to adopt the cause of Israel’s elimination as a noble aim that will advance human rights.
•They want their governments to cut all diplomatic, commercial and cultural links with Israel and impose punishing sanctions in their place.
•They want Western civil society — universities, unions, media outlets, organizations and campaigns pursuing social justice, religious groups, intellectuals, health workers, lawyers and a myriad of other sectors — to embrace a total boycott of Israel.
•They want to criminalize Israeli citizens and diaspora Jews who serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
•They want to criminalize Israel’s political and military leaders.
•They want to outlaw Zionist political and social organizations, youth groups and charities.
•They want to strictly police Jewish communities in order to eliminate the presence of any Zionist affiliations — meaning that Jewish schools, synagogues, community centers, kosher markets and restaurants would be prohibited from using or trading in Israeli products, displaying the Israeli flag, reciting the prayer for the State of Israel on Shabbat and during festivals, carrying out Zionist education programs, teaching the history of Israel and assisting with aliyah
And make no mistake: Any Jewish resistance to these measures would be met with a merciless response. Public condemnation. Media vilification. Fines. Arrests. Eventually, worse, if we let them.
These witch-hunters have been on the margins of democratic societies for decades, coming to the fore on those occasions when the violent Palestinian objection to Israel’s existence returns to the boil.
See The ‘Riverway to Sea’ on page 2
is taking a summer break. B’ezrat Hashem, we will return after Tisha B’Av, on Wed. Aug. 6.
Jewish replacement theory, shouted in 2017 by torch-bearing marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, was featured in this 1892 cartoon that proclaimed: ‘Instead of returning to the holy land to build up Jerusalem and to restore the glories of their race, the chosen people are coming to the metropolis of the new world.’
This political cartoon, one of a series of antisemitic works appearing in Judge magazine in the 1890s, was titled, “Their New Jerusalem.” It shows Jews driven from Russia by persecution coming to New York City in rags and becoming prosperous due to their “Perseverance and Industry,” and in the process forcing established New Yorkers to move West (that’s the Jewish replacement libel echoed in Charlottesville a century and quarter later).
GLOBAL FOCUS
BEN COHEN
Good news for Israel, bad news for diaspora Jews
THANE ROSENBAUM
Rome is burning. The Titanic is sinking. And Jews, once again, are fiddling beside Nero while an orchestra goes down with the ship.
For a preternaturally nervous people, Jews sometimes have great difficulty in taking a hint. A certain amount of Jewish nonchalance is understandable, I guess. The Jewish state seems to be out of crisis. That’s good for Israelis. But the same cannot be said of the Jewish people — and surely not Jewish Americans and European Jewry.
Successes on the battlefield may be a false flag. Yes, the geopolitical scorecard indicates that Israel bested five adversaries on four separate fronts: Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; and the rabid Islamists of Iran. Nearly all were routed quickly.
Israel’s wartime achievements, with a massive air defense and buster bomb assist from the Trump administration, will stand for the ages.
The Middle East map now looks very different. Israel’s enduring nemesis to its south is nearly vanquished. Maybe Gaza will be rebuilt with the remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood making life miserable for some other Arab country. Perhaps the Lebanese will rejoin the family of civilized nations by finally removing the Shi’ites from their midst. Saudi Arabia could assist in ridding Yemen of the Houthis.
The pro-Hamas campus protests are coming to a City Hall near you.
Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia might be persuaded to join the Abraham Accords.
Talk about a sweeping regional turnaround. Iran is in the market for spare parts with which to spin centrifuges for their decimated uranium enrichment project. I got a better idea. How about fast-tracking the martyrs’ death wish these Islamic Revolutionaries yearn for so zealously?
Meanwhile, life for Jews outside of Israel is a bit grimmer.
In the United Kingdom, a report coauthored by the government’s adviser on antisemitism and a former Conservative Defense Secretary, revealed some alarming changes in the usual stiff upper lip of British society. The country is awash in widespread antisemitism, everywhere one looks — ranging from healthcare and university life to cultural institutions. British Jews are now apparently being excluded from professional and public arenas that once embraced them.
Worse still, hate crimes against Jews, espe-
cially when they occur during pro-Palestinian protests, are the lowest priorities of the London police. Indeed, antisemitism is no longer viewed as racism. Pervasive anti-Israel sentiments have spurned the old rules. Attacking Jews in jolly London is now accepted as a righteous human rights crusade.
How appropriate to kick off this new species of hatred in the United Kingdom. England expelled its Jews for nearly the entirety of the Middle Ages — the first European country to do so. Not a single Jewish person lived in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
No wonder the groundlings at the Globe Theater jeered Shylock so mercilessly in those first performances of “The Merchant of Venice.” The English hadn’t seen a Jew in over 200 years! I wish I could report better news in other European nations — but I can’t.
In America, Democrats in North Carolina, a moderate swing state, formally condemned Israel for “apartheid rule.” They also called for an arms embargo against America’s Middle
East ally. The Democratic Party in Wisconsin and Washington State passed similar resolutions. Michigan has a crowded field of candidates running for a US Senate seat, in a battleground state where a Muslim candidate is charging Israel with genocide, and where 100,000 withheld their votes in the last election in protest against Joe Biden’s perceived support of Israel. Polling nationwide is dismal — especially among Democrats. The Pew Research Center reported that among adults, 53 percent have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, an increase from three years earlier, when it was 42 percent. A sizable majority of Democrats, 69 percent, view Israel negatively, compared to Republicans at 37 percent.
A survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs rated Israel with a 41 on a 100-point scale. It was an 11-point decline since 2022. Never has Israel’s rating sunk that low. Nearly 70 percent of Democrats believed that the United States should stay out of the Israel-Palestinian conflict altogether. If forced to choose, 20 percent favor the Palestinians; fewer than half favor the Israelis.
MAGA Republicans are losing their love of Israel and affection for Jews — if such amorous feelings ever existed at all.
Trump’s hardcore base opposed America’s involvement in Israel’s airstrikes over Iran — even after it proved to be an overwhelming success.
Now right-wing gadfly Tucker Carlson is arguing that any American who served in the IDF, assisting Israel in any capacity, should forfeit American citizenship. He also now speculates that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was for many decades a Mossad agent, and that the Justice Department’s failure to release the names of his associates is a Deep State coverup serving the interests of Israel. Many of his viewers are in agreement.
New York City, the financial capital of the world, and home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, appears to be on the verge of electing a Marxist mayor who does not
See Rosenbaum on page 4
The ‘Riverway to Sea’ people don’t fool around…
Since the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, they have never been as visible or as influential as they are now, crystallizing in and around the pro-Hamas solidarity movement that has made even the most assimilated, Israel-distant Jews wonder whether antisemitism might really be a permanent, irredeemable defect of the societies in which they live.
•You will find them at the United Nations, from where the now-sanctioned Special Rapporteu for Palestinian Rights, Francesca Albanese, has been waging a campaign to boycott and sanction any company with ties to Israel.
•You will find them among academics who are far too numerous to mention by name.
•You will find them in the halls of Congress and in parliaments in Europe, Australia and Canada, among other places, again too numerous to mention individually.
•You will find them clustered around the mayoral campaign of the antisemite Zohran Mamdani in New York City. You will find them on social media, even if you’re not looking.
Were I to dip my arms elbow-deep into this sewer, I would extract as Exhibits “A” and “B” of this approaching witch-hunt two UK-based individuals whom you’ve likely never heard of. I would do so because these two have embarked on an initiative quite unlike anything since the Cold War, when Jews in the Soviet Union, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and other Communist countries were viciously persecuted by the authorities in the name of “antiZionism.”
Ansari and Magennis made waves earlier this year when they launched a bid to remove the United Kingdom’s proscription of Hamas — an organization both of them revere — as a terrorist organization. Their new project, whose name synthesizes the name of their former law firm with the pro-Hamas chant “From the river to the sea,” aims to support, from the United Kingdom and eventually from other countries as well, Hamas’s blood-soaked campaign to eliminate Israel, using the law as their instrument.
“Israel, Zionism and Zionists are,” they say, “vulnerable to challenge in a wide range of legal contexts.”
No ambiguity there: individuals as well as institutions will be targeted for the “crime,” in their eyes, of Zionism.
If you want to work for Ansari and Magennis, you will need to be as hate-filled as they are. The first question on the application for the role of “Events, Training and Comms” at their new organization reads as follows: “How will you use the time and space created by this position to deal maximum damage to Zionism?”
What’s striking about these two is that despite their declared focus on the legal process to achieve their ends, their language indicates a proclivity for violence that goes beyond their
Their names are Fahad Ansari, an Islamist, and Franck Magennis, a Communist. This truly sinister pair (who remind me of Joseph Stalin’s hissing prosecutors) have just launched “Riverway to the Sea,” an organization that transforms their London-based law firm into a legal center working for the death of, as they themselves put it, “the failed, fascist experiment currently known as ‘Israel’.”
Islamist
and Communist Franck Magennis have turned their London law firm into the hub of a campaign to kill — in its words — ‘the failed, fascist experiment currently known as Israel.’
legal pleas for Hamas and unconditional support for Palestine Action, a fiercely antisemitic grouping that the British government designated as a terrorist organization earlier this month.
Addressing a far-left group last week, Magennis said that the task of the audience when it came to Zionism was to “kick it to death.”
On social media, one pictures him frothing as he stabs his keyboard: “Zionism is crumbling. The reckoning is here. … Tear down the world that did this to Palestinians. Escalate! Escalate now!” (Amusingly, Magennis — yet another Irishman in thrall to Palestinian eliminationism — suddenly became very sensitive about anti-Irish tropes when a respondent made a joke about him going to bed clutching a bottle of whiskey.) Ansari, meanwhile, continues in a
similar vein, hailing the “unique opportunity to do real damage to Zionism” he believes his organization embodies.
“Real damage” means advocating for and implementing the measures I described above, whose impact will be felt primarily by British Jews, not the Israeli government.
This is not an accident; in the multifront war launched by Hamas nearly two years ago, the role of its international solidarity movement is to make life as unpleasant as possible for the vast majority of Jews who identify as Zionists. In that regard, the handful of Jewish anti-Zionists in their ranks provides some convenient cover, much as the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party did when the Bolsheviks banned Zionist organizations and cracked down on Hebrew and Jewish education.
With the exceptions of the present US administration and the current German government, no other Western government has understood, let alone acted upon, the grave threat these groups and individuals represent.
As a first priority, the welcome US sanctions on Albanese — rooted in the same executive order applied to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for its pursuit of American citizens and allies of the United States like Israel — should now be expanded to all groups dedicated to waging lawfare against Israel and Jewish communities outside Israel.
We don’t want you here, and you should entertain no illusions: We will defeat you. Ben Cohen is a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Continued from page 1
Fahad Ansari
Michaklootwijk, Adobe
Rosenbaum Israel frenzy over $4-trillion NVIDIA
Continued from page 2
believe the Jewish state has a right to exist and has no intention to ever visit Israel should he get elected.
What’s more, Zohran Mamdani refuses to disavow the chant “globalize the intifada.” Like “by any means necessary,” he maintains that such loaded language is nothing but a vague expression of Palestinian support and not an explicit call for the murder of Jews.
Voters beware: the pro-Hamas campus protests are coming to a City Hall near you. Mamdani’s candidacy is complicated by the public statements of his father, a Columbia history professor who has glorified suicide bombers, supported the BDS movement, and charged the Jewish state with genocide.
Most Democratic elected officials have stayed silent. Even Jewish Democrats have declined to reject Mamdani’s fitness to represent them. Some have bizarrely formed a bandwagon to make Mamdani’s campaign kosher.
The Chairman of the Democratic National Committee opined that there is plenty of room in the party for a broad coalition — one that apparently includes those who wish the destruction of Israel and personally despise American Jews.
Would this “big tent” also welcome the Klan?
It’s all too easy to dismiss Jew-haters as unenlightened. The biases of human beings, after all, are often hidden from view. And there are wide gaps in knowledge.
You know Jews are in trouble when artificial intelligence produces the same results. Elon Musk’s company, xAI, and its chatbot, Grok, regurgitated antisemitic tropes this week that would have made even neo-Nazis blush.
Let’s hope Jews are paying attention.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
By Erez Linn, Israel Hayom
Nvidia has received numerous offers from Israeli municipalities and organizations seeking to host the company’s planned massive campus expansion, as the US artificial intelligence chip giant looks to significantly grow its operations in the Jewish state.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, the first company in the world valued at $4 trillion, issued a request for information this week to acquire land for a new facility near its existing northern Israel campus.
The move comes less than a decade after its acquisition of Israeli-based Mellanox in Yokneam Illit, which transformed the AI industry and made the AI revolution possible.
Industry sources told Reuters that the new project could cost billions of dollars and create thousands of jobs. The world’s most valuable company by market capitalization has set a July 23 deadline for offers to build its campus of up to 1.94 million square feet.
Nvidia acquired its Israel presence in 2020 through the purchase of Mellanox Technologies for nearly $7 billion. The company has since expanded its workforce dramatically, nearly tripling in size since the acquisition. Its current Israeli operations are based in Yokneam, near Haifa, where numerous technology companies maintain facilities.
Haifa officials told Reuters that they are “currently busy preparing an attractive offer for the company” and believe that Haifa is “the city with the best potential for them.”
The expansion comes as major technology companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Alphabet and Tesla compete to build AI data centers and dominate the emerging technology sector. This competition has led to a surge in demand for Nvidia’s high-end processors, driving the company’s remarkable growth trajectory.
One source familiar with the matter told Reuters that Israel’s expertise was “extremely important to the AI era” and that Nvidia needed to expand rapidly to meet demand. The company employs 5,000 workers in Israel and has made several additional acquisitions in the country over recent years.
According to information obtained by Israel Hayom, the planned center could accommodate at least 3,000 employees, with the project expected to unfold over several years.
Nvidia stressed that the requested land must be available for immediate purchase and construction.
Dror Bin, CEO of the Israel Innovation Au-
thority, described the planned campus as massive and capable of housing “a few thousand employees.” He told Reuters that “Nvidia sees its operation in Israel as something which is going to stay here for a very long time and to expand here — is a sign of confidence in Israel.”
The expansion announcement comes as rival Intel faces challenges in the region. Intel, which has operated in Israel since 1974 and employs 9,350 workers in the country, has begun trimming its workforce globally. Israeli media reported that several hundred workers in Israel are being made redundant, though a local spokesperson declined to comment on specific numbers.
Nvidia-Mellanox campus in Yokneam Illit, Lower Galilee.
Chabad-Atlantic Beach war: Peace at last, or just a ceasefire?
KEVIN J. KELLEY
LI Herald columnist
All parties now appear eager to end the bruising battle between the Village of Atlantic Beach and the barrier-island branch of Chabad.
“All we have been after is to be a good member of this community,” says Jeremy Dys, an attorney with the Texas-based religious-rights organization that represents Chabad of the Beaches. “It’s in everybody’s interest to be tolerant.”
But tolerance was in short supply when the village moved in 2021 to block Chabad from opening an outreach center at the foot of the Atlantic Beach Bridge. Using the mechanism of eminent domain, the village seized the property Chabad had purchased, along with an adjacent vacant lot owned by a local family.
Chabad then sued the village, complaining that its First Amendment religious-freedom rights were being violated. Chabad cited prejudiced statements made by a few village officials and residents. A federal District Court judge ruled in Chabad’s favor in September 2022.
Ayear later, the village agreed to pay Chabad $400,000, and to allow the group to move forward in converting a former Capital One bank building into a religious facility. The federal court had stipulated, meanwhile, that the village had to approve zoning variances sought by Chabad. But last October, the Atlantic Beach zoning board denied all but one of several requested variances. Chabad then vetoed the 2023 settlement.
Protracted negotiations ensued, with Atlantic Beach bargaining from a weak defensive position. Chabad held the option of hauling the village back into federal court. Such a move would have cost Atlantic Beach much more than the $710,000 it has already paid five law firms involved in the eminent domain cases. In addition, the village could have wound up paying Chabad multiples of the $400,000 agreed on in 2023.
A new deal was announced on July 1, with Atlantic Beach paying Chabad $950,000. That settlement was contingent on the zoning board accepting the relevant terms at its
Mayor George Pappas probably reasoned, probably correctly, that many of his constituents wanted to keep Chabad out of Atlantic Beach.
scheduled July 17 meeting.
With all current costs taken into account, the village has spent $2.8 million on the eminent domain conflicts. None of this was inevitable, but it’s also not surprising.
Although it claimed to have seized the properties in order to build a community center, the village was clearly acting in response to fears that Chabad’s presence would alter the character of the community.
Then-six-term Mayor George Pappas probably reasoned — probably correctly — that many of his constituents wanted to keep Chabad out of Atlantic Beach. (Pappas, who resigned the day after the settlement was announced, declined to comment.)
With 1,700 year-round residents and several second or third homes occupied only in summer, Atlantic Beach is an affluent, homogenous, conservative enclave that bars outsiders from using its beaches. The village, a stone’s throw from Queens at its western end, is more than 96 percent white. Hardly any voices were raised in support of Chabad’s First Amendment rights and in opposition to the village’s insularity.
At the same time, there was considerable dissatisfaction with the costly way in which Pappas and village trustees fought the Chabad battle. That discontent was exacerbated by an 87 percent local property tax hike announced in April. One-third of that whopping increase is a product of the eminent-domain disputes.
Residents’ desire for a new political dispensation was made manifest in the June 17 election for two of the five seats on the village board. The top vote-getter was Joseph Pierantoni, the candidate most outspokenly critical of the village’s performance. Another challenger was also elected, while the sole incumbent seeking re-election was soundly rejected.
Pierantoni and the two other current board members, Barry Frohlinger and Laura Heller, all pledged at a July 7 meeting to conduct village affairs in a more transparent, communicative and fiscally prudent manner.
Will comity prevail now that the Chabad melee is almost over? Are Atlantic Beach residents going to evince tolerance for a group that has offered little in the way of compromise during the long-running battle? Is peace at hand, or is it only a ceasefire?
Much will depend on how Chabad operates its programming center and the food and beverage drive-through that will be part of it. Will Chabad allay neighbors’ concerns about traffic, parking and noise?
Chabad’s local opponents may harbor feelings too raw to permit an open accounting of motives, tactics and blame. But such a self-assessment may eventually have to take place in order for genuine closure to be achieved.
Kevin J. Kelley, of Atlantic Beach, is a retired journalist and journalism professor.
The column first appeared in the Nassau Herald.
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Targeting Iran nukes: Lion doesn’t sleep tonight
t took more than 20 years of meticulous planning and practice for Israel to launch “Operation Rising Lion.” The Jewish state used every tool it could muster, from the clandestine forces of the Mossad to its mighty air arsenal.
It took almost two decades for America to develop the munitions and delivery system to finish the job. But more than mere munitions, it was the mental trigger that made the “12Day War” an explosive reality.
The turning point for Israel was Oct. 7, 2023, followed by the frightening certitude that Iran was just two weeks from nuclear readiness. Iran’s warhead, developed with the help of Ukrainian nuclear scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko, was an R-265 shock generator assembled in two hemispheres.
Its surface was lined with 5-millimeter channels stuffed with PETN configured to implode with massive force from all directions simultaneously, transduced into an exploding bridgewire fuse connected to a neutron initiator primed to emit a stray neutron into the metalized 90-percent U-235 HEU sphere at its core to ignite the chain reaction, producing a mushroom cloud just as the Shahab-3 rocket carrying the warhead reached 550 meters above ground.
The bomb prototype had been tested with tungsten in a giant bomb chamber equipped with special high-speed cameras for review. In 2024, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) detected particles of uranium
to the weapons-grade 90 percent requisite for a nuclear explosion.
In a final flurry of murderous engineering, Iranian scientists at the Semnan Missile Site north of Tehran were trying to affix these warheads to an exospheric Ghaem-100 spacelaunched missile, which could attack Israel from above at an especially hard-to-intercept oblique angle.
Israel’s worried realizations fused into action under “The New Conceptzia.” The old conceptzia died on Oct. 7, 2023. The New Conceptzia, born on Oct. 8, 2023, held that it was better to be alive than to be loved — and that the manners and mechanisms of midtown Manhattan would not work in a volatile Middle East, which had been slitting throats for centuries.
As for America, its resolve reached a turning point on January 20, 2025, when Donald Trump took the oath of office.
Unquestionably, Operation Rising Lion and Operation Midnight Hammer obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s three central nuclear linchpins — Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahanb — suffered the 30,000-pound percussive power of 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, 30-plus submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles, and a gamut of Israeli air assaults. More than 10,000 sensitive centrifuges, plus enrichment and bomb assembly facilities, were utterly destroyed.
Even a missing cache of 400 kilograms (82 lb.) of 60-percent HEU would be useless unless it could be further enriched to 90 percent by additional cascades of IR-6 centrifuges and metalized into a core for further machining in a long, elaborate process that would take years to reassemble.
of a nuclear bomb process disrupted for mere months, experts at the IAEA, the CIA, Israel’s intelligence community, and top independent nuclear weapons watchdogs all agree the damage created years of forced disruption of Iran’s nuclear program. Its nuclear enterprise has indeed been halted.
array of operatives and unseen operations in Iran, the Tehran regime arrested more than 700 “suspects,” rushed to execute seven of them just three days after the war, imposed a nearly complete internet blackout, and begun randomly stopping citizens the street and confiscating their phones.
Among the targets for random roundups and executions were Jewish Iranians and anyone uttering a syllable of criticism toward the authoritarian regime. Ordinary Iranians are now leaving their phones at home and living in fear of the knock at the door.
While Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan are collapsed and shattered, Iran may reconstitute its demolished centrifuge manufacturing capability at any of its 24 of other decentralized nuclear installations. These may be burrowed into mountains, such as the Pickaxe facility, located a short distance from Natanz, or be covertly installed in a barn, or in the massive hold of an oil tanker. Iran maintains three oil tankers converted to special military vessels. If Tehran so willed it, the entire program could even be moved to Yemen.
Two things can be true at once. Yes, Iran’s nuclear capability was obliterated, and the brain trust behind it was killed off. But what has been obliterated can be reborn. Any fanatical, apocalyptic regime that has spent decades and billions of dollars, and endured global sanctions and national stagnation, to engineer weapons of mass destruction can and will be willing to reconstruct its projects and harden its obsession.
Putting aside the fallacious, low-confidence initial bomb damage assessment that spoke
What everyone wants to know is whether Iran is actually willing to call it quits, or whether it is hell bent on restarting and completing its mission to destroy Israel. For those who know the “Twelver” mindset, which envisions the return of the Twelfth Imam, it is clear that the fanatical Shia regime will never give up just because it has sustained humiliating kinetic damage from Israel and America.
Nor will Tehran desist now that it knows it was fundamentally alone in its 12-Day War. The Axis of Resistance, embodied by Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as offshoots in Syria and Iraq, Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and branch operations in the West Bank, fell almost completely silent during the conflict. Israel had subdued them all in advance. Ironically, this ring of terrorist organizations was, in large measure, constructed and funded with more than a billion dollars in windfall from the now-defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
When President Barack Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry forced the fatal pact through the international community and the American Congress, they both knew and both admitted they knew that the towers of money gushing into Iran’s coffers would fund terrorists devoting to killing Jews, and as a bonus, provide a bomb certain to reach fruition in 15 years. They also knew that with cheating, this 15-year timeframe could shrink to a mere decade. That meant 2025.
Yet, as the smoke clears and the rubble is fully visualized, the fanatical theocracy in Iran shouts that it will rebuild its program and try once again to deliver its weapons of mass destruction.
Iran’s parliament approved a measure banning all cooperation with the IAEA. This bill was approved by non-elected members of the Guardian Council, thus becoming law. Although in a loophole, the law permits future inspection if authorized by the Supreme National Security Council. When the measure was ratified, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf promised Iran’s nuclear program would be reconstituted. IAEA inspectors, fearful for their safety, have already exited Iranian territory.
In their post-war rage, the ayatollahs issued a fatwa beseeching anyone to murder Trump. In an effort to discover all the epithelial embeds of Mossad, which still maintains a vast
Therefore, so long as there is no regime change in Tehran, so long as its mullahs remain devoted to mass murder, so long as the world permits it, we might well see Iran’s nuclear program return — or perhaps see another method of death and destruction not yet envisioned. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benja-
Two
things can be true at once. Iran’s nuclear capability was obliterated and its brain trust was killed off — but if there is no regime change in Tehran, Iran’s nukes may return.
min Netanyahu have promised to strike again if they see signs of a reconstituted program. Netanyahu even warned, “We will treat Iran’s nuclear program like a cancer that needs to be constantly monitored and possibly treated again. We think we know where Iran’s enriched uranium is located — it is sort of located underground in a certain location.”
The White House has been implying that a peace agreement with Iran may be in the offering, an agreement no one expects Iran to honor, just as it refused to honor the JCPOA. Therefore, both the Israeli and American administrations remain skeptical — and laser-focused. Tehran announced that its newly appointed head of the armed forces would remain anonymous for his own protection. Mossad was quick to issue a message: “Know that we know his actual name and are well acquainted with him.”
The Rising Lion will not sleep tonight. Israel’s leadership knows the goblets of victory are not half-full; they are half-empty.
Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of “IBM and the Holocaust” and his just-released scoop volume, “Israel Strikes Iran: Operation Rising LionThe 20-Year Backstory,” which can be found at IsraelStrikes.com. He hosts The Edwin Black Show. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
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Meduzot watch: How Israel deals with jellyfish HEALTH, MIND & BODY
By Howard Blas, JNS
For Israeli parents of young children, a summer trip to the beach includes packing hats and sunscreen, towels and toys, water and snacks.
In recent years, it also means visiting a popular website, www.meduzot.co.il/overviewmap, https://www.meduzot.co.il/ for the latest information on jellyfish, known in Hebrew as meduzot
Professor Dor Edelist, a marine macro-ecologist at the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa, could not be happier that word of the site is spreading.
Edelist tells JNS that each summer, between one and two million people visit the site, which has a jellyfish icon over various stretches of beaches along the Mediterranean Sea.
Since its founding in 2011, 5,000 to 6,000 people have opted to participate in “citizen science” by serving as voluntary reporters of the location, number and species of jellyfish they observe.
The main species of jellyfish in Israel is Rhopilema nomadic (the nomad jellyfish), although 16 other species may be spotted across the country’s beaches.
Millions of jellyfish have invaded the shores of Israel this summer, from popular beaches in the north, including Haifa and Netanya, to Tel Aviv and Herzliya in the center and Ashkelon and Ashdod in the south.
A 15-year-old girl was recently stung by a giant jellyfish while she was swimming at a beach in Netanya and was rescued by a local surfer. The traumatized girl was taken by ambulance to Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba, where she was hospitalized with second-degree burns.
Jellyfish recently clogged the cooling system at the Rutenberg Power Station in Ashkelon, which a team from the Israel Electric Corporation speedily deal with to prevent harm to the electricity supply. “We’re conducting continuous monitoring and are prepared for such cases but the quantities this year are exceptional,” the IEC said.
The website, which for now is in Hebrew only, offers links to “Have you seen a jellyfish? Submit a report,” a jellyfish reporter leaderboard (“We have much bigger plans for badges, etc.—right now it is just whoever had the most observations over the last week, month, year”), jellyfish species in Israel, a jellyfish photo con-
test, partner organizations and a contact form.
The site has faced some challenges. “We do our best and have few complaints, but there is zero guarantee” as to the accuracy of the reporting, says Edelist, who reports that “internet trolls” making continuous reports of jellyfish have at times compromised accuracy. His team has recently been using special software to detect such fake reports.
A second challenge for the site takes place “in the winter, when jellyfish are out, but people are not in the water [to report them], so we need to rely on seamen and divers,” Edelist adds.
Dr. Zafrir Kuplik, a researcher and curator of the coelenterates collection at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University, says it is a “misconception” that jellyfish are only present in the summer and only in warm weather.
“You see them in the winter, but fewer,” he tells JNS. “They roam out at sea. They may be remains of the summer swarms.”
Kuplik shares that the presence of jellyfish is a “function of their life cycle” and that they
are “current dependent.” Kuplik points out that jellyfish can be seen in water bodies around the world, including the North Sea.
Kuplik and Edelist are part of a close-knit community of Israeli jellyfish researchers who share a love for jellyfish and strive to provide an accurate picture of these aquatic animals that, they point out, belong to the Phylum Cnidaria and the marine class Scyphozoa.
“You can count jellyfish experts on one hand,” notes Edelstein playfully. He is a self-described fish specialist who became interested in jellyfish 15 years ago while working on his PhD. At the time, a colleague invited him to observe jellyfish polyps under a microscope — and he was hooked.
Something about these polyps, which eventually produce a dozen or more juvenile jellyfish, excited him. “It hit me that jellyfish are not a problem to solve, but a challenge to deal with,” he says.
One challenge jellyfish pose is that they visit Israeli beaches every summer from mid-June to mid-August and sometimes do sting human be-
ings. But there are precautions swimmers can take, such as consulting the website or visiting a map prior to setting out for the beach.
Edelist is pleased that the map of jellyfish whereabouts also appears on the weather page of some news websites. Beaches where there is a concern by the authorities about jellyfish display a bright purple flag with a white jellyfish on it.
The Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection, headed by Minister Idit Silman, is ultimately responsible for managing jellyfish populations in Israel, especially their impact on coastal areas and power plants.
The ministry’s spokesperson Fred Arzoine told JNS that it is “well aware of the jellyfish issue in Israel. The ministry has been funding national monitoring of the marine environment at all levels for decades.” But, he added, “There is no special policy on the issue in the context of preventing marine pollution.”
The ministry’s website offers, in English, “First Aid Care for Jellyfish Sting.” It explains that jellyfish travel to the Israeli coasts every summer as the Mediterranean Sea warms up, and that they use their tentacles to sting and emit a venom which can lead to a rash, redness, pain or swelling. Washing the affected area first with seawater, then with fresh water, is useful.
Applying aloe is also effective. Edelist notes that wearing lycra or a diving suit can be beneficial.
On a recent late afternoon visit to the lifeguard station at the Hilton Tzafon (North) Beach, lifeguard Alexi remarks that it is not very crowded today due to the jellyfish. “There are no jellyfish in the pool!” he quips, pointing to the nearby Gordon Pool.
He explains that when the water gets very warm in the summer, the jellyfish come close to shore. He shows me the aloe plants in planters along the boardwalk near the snack bar and explains that — consistent with EPA recommendations — they offer fresh aloe to beachgoers in the event of a sting.
Edelist, somewhat concerned that jellyfish get a bad reputation, stresses that jellyfish “have no desire to waste precious sting cells” on people. They “just drift passively” and tend to “swim away from you — so their stingers are facing toward you.” He notes that they sense various creatures with their receptors.
Hadassah taps development and marketing excs
Hadassah has appointed Steven Mark as Chief Development Officer and Dana Asher as Co-Director of Marketing & Communications.
“With the arrival of Steven Mark and Dana Asher, we once again have the full staff team we need to help our members and volunteer leaders advance Hadassah’s mission,” said Carol Ann Schwartz, National President. “During one of the most challenging times for Israel and Jews in living memory, that mission — to advocate for Israel, fight antisemitism, support the work of Hadassah’s hospitals in Jerusalem and promote women’s health equity — is more important than ever.”
Mark will lead a team of 41 philanthropy professionals who collaborate with more than 75 volunteer leaders around the country. Together, they raise funds to support the work of the Hadassah Medical Organization, Hadassah’s academic medical center in Jerusalem, and Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah program, which operates residential communities for vulnerable Israeli teens and pre-teens.
At New York Medical College, Mark shepherded a dental school from capital campaign launch
to groundbreaking; at StartCare, he built a development department from scratch while increasing fundraising revenues to nearly $10 million from less than $100,000; at Hunter College, he raised $10 million from first-time donors, over-
saw the completion of a $40 million library campaign, and partnered with then-president Jennifer Raab to secure a $52 million donation for the nursing school, the largest gift in CUNY history. Asher will partner with fellow co-director
Sharon Scalora to lead a 20-person Marketing & Communications team charged with articulating Hadassah’s mission and sharing news of the organization’s activities with its stakeholders. Like Scalora, she will work with Hadassah volunteer leaders across the country.
Over the course of three decades, Asher has held a variety of marketing roles at Jewish organizations that include UJA-Federation and Women’s American ORT as well as Yeshiva University. An emblematic example of her accomplishments is a marketing strategy instrumental in driving a $613 million, five-year YU capital campaign so successful it reached 85 percent of its goal in just three years.
“Dana Asher’s broad experience in not-for-profit marketing and her deep knowledge of the Jewish communal world are a perfect fit for Hadassah, with its diverse array of programs and activities in the US and Israel,” said CEO Ellen Finkelstein. “With his skill in securing major gifts, leading successful capital campaigns and dramatically increasing individual donations, Steven Mark is the ideal person to lead Hadassah’s development effort.”
Dana Asher
Steven Mark
A large swarm of jellyfish in the waters along the Haifa Port in the summer of 2022. Dudu Gabrieli
• Obstetrics & Gynecology
• Maternal-Fetal Medicine
• Gynecology-Oncology
• Breast Surgery
• Urogynecology
•
• Diagnostic Ultrasounds
• Breast Biopsy Procedures
• Bone Density Testing
• Nutrition Services
By Vita Fellig, JNS
Jewish New Yorkers should stand their ground and fight for their city rather than leave in response to Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic primary win, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at a Jewish heritage celebration at Gracie Mansion in Manhattan.
“You have the right to be in the city and anywhere in this country,” Adams told an audience of about 1,000 at the Tuesday night event on the mansion grounds in Carl Schurz Park. “History has shown that through time, you often have to find yourself leaving, fleeing.”
The celebration, typically held in May for Jewish Heritage Month, was rained out and rescheduled for the sweltering July evening, amid a citywide heatwave advisory.
“From the days of Moses to fleeing Spain when Christopher Columbus was leaving to the days of living in the Jewish quarters in Rome to the days of the Holocaust, you found yourself constantly leaving,” Adams told attendees.
Particularly after the Democratic primary for mayor, Adams, who is running for reelection, said that he has heard “many of my Jewish brothers and sisters saying they’re leaving.”
“I’m saying to you, we will run no more. We will stay and fight for the city that we love,” he told attendees. “We will not be the generation of fleeing and of leaving. We will be the generation to push back against hate. That’s what we must be.”
Adams likened rising antisemitism in New York City to the fabled frog, which is said to boil in water without realizing if the temperature is only increased a small amount at a time.
(Although the notion is not scientific,
Adams said he recalled it as a science experiment from elementary school.)
“We have turned the antisemitism degree up one degree at a time, and many of us have stood there and watched their hatred boil our cities and our country and even in the international community,” he said.
“The first thing we must acknowledge is that the heat of antisemitism has gotten too hot in our country, and it cannot continue to rise in degrees in our city where we have the largest Jewish population outside of Israel,” he told attendees.
“So I’m here to turn off the flame, to get the frog out of the pot and make sure that we don’t allow hate to live in our city in any form and in any way,” he said.
Adams, who faces a crowded field in November’s mayoral election, received chants of “four more years” from the crowd.
Jessica Tish, the New York City
police commissioner who is Jewish, praised her boss and compared him to the biblical figure of Balaam, a gentile prophet who ends up blessing the Jews, from this week’s Torah portion. (It seemed that she didn’t mean the comparison to extend to rabbinic traditions of calling Balaam “the evil one.”)
“Mayor Adams did not grow up into the Jewish community, but to his core he understands it,” Tish told attendees. “He sees the richness of Jewish life, traditions, the sacred values and he honors it. Not just with words but with his actions.”
Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, also addressed attendees. He denounced calls for a “global intifada” and said that shared American and Jewish values must be emphasized around the world.
“The Jews of New York played a vital role in building this city, grounded in the shared values of the United States and the Jewish people: the val-
ues of freedom and democracy,” he said. “Throughout history, many enemies and leaders vowed to destroy the Jewish people. They are gone and we are still here.”
“No one will preach to us, and no one will bring the Jewish people to their knees,” he said.
Adams honored several attendees for their contributions to the Jewish community, including Joseph Shamie, Victoria Zirkiev and Shulem and Chavy Greenberg on behalf of the charity Chesed 24/7 and the journalist, Douglas Murray.
Accepting an award at the event, Murray decried the rise in Jew-hatred in New York City after Oct. 7.
“To have a man like Mayor Adams in New York, to continue to say what he’s said for so long — that we don’t have to tolerate intolerance, that we don’t have to give a free ride to people who would kill us, to be able to make a stand, that has had a huge impact on
all New Yorkers, Jewish and non-Jewish,” Murray said.
“What Mayor Adams realizes, as many of us do, is that the problem with antisemitism is that once a society plays with it, it will play with every other dark prejudice next,” he said.
Among the guests braving the heat were Chassidim, Jewish social media influencers and Upper East Side philanthropists, who ate barbecue surrounded by blooming blue hydrangeas. Israeli pop music played in the background.
A tented section of the lawn, strung with lights and a disco ball, featured a bar serving red and white wine and Schweppes seltzer. (A bartender told JNS a “majority” was opting for the seltzer.)
The event also featured a performance by Jewish singer Yoni Zigelboum, who sang “Am Yisrael Chai” as well as the aria “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s opera Turandot.
Adams to Mamdani-phobic Jews: Stay and fight Perspective, purpose, pride from a trip to Spain
When Hannah Gold, a student at Long Island’s Adelphi University, boarded a plane to Spain earlier this month, she wasn’t just going on a trip — she was stepping into a story that once tried to erase people like her.
More than 500 years after Spain expelled its Jews during the Inquisition, Hannah joined over 100 Jewish students from across North America to walk the same streets where Jewish life once thrived and was violently silenced. But this time, they walked proudly.
They sang Hebrew songs. They lit Shabbat candles in places where it had once been illegal to be Jewish. And for Hannah, it was deeply personal.
“There was something powerful about showing up as a proud Jew in a place that once tried to erase us,” she said. “It felt like we were reclaiming something, not just from the past, but from what we’re going through now, too.”
Hannah is part of JewishU, a flagship program from Chabad on Campus International that rewards students for their Torah learning with immersive, meaningful travel experiences. The Platinum Trip to Spain was fully subsidized and offered only to students who had completed weeks of rigorous study.
But the reward wasn’t just a trip but a chance to anchor Jewish identity in lived experience. In Córdoba and Granada, the students explored the remnants of a golden age of Jewish scholarship and witnessed the traces of a commu-
nity that had once helped shape the soul of Spain, before being driven out by violence, fear, and forced conversions. Now, Jewish students are again facing hostility, not from kings or inquisitors, but from peers and professors on the campuses they call home.
With antisemitism rising at universities across the countrystudents like Hannah find themselves once again defending their right to simply be who they are.
“The parallels were hard to ignore,” Hannah said. “We were standing in the
ruins of a world that was taken from us, and it felt like a warning — and a reminder. Jewish life doesn’t just survive on its own. It takes courage to keep it alive.”
For Hannah, that courage began before she ever left New York. When
she learned about JewishU through a friend who had qualified for a previous trip, she realized there wasn’t yet a chapter on her campus. So she started one, making it possible for herself and her classmates to join the program and study together.
That initiative led her to Spain. And Spain gave her something in return: perspective, purpose, and pride.
At a time when Jewish students sometimes feel isolated or uncertain about expressing their identity, JewishU offers something different: strength through learning, connection through community, and pride rooted in thousands of years of resilience.
Alongside the powerful moments of reflection came joy and celebration. The group danced flamenco, toured palaces, and stayed up late talking about everything from Jewish philosophy to life back on campus.
But even the fun carried a deeper meaning: they weren’t just tourists — they were living proof that Jewish life continues.
“Lighting Shabbat candles in a country where it was once banned was very symbolic,” Hannah said.
Now back at Adelphi, Hannah is helping grow her campus chapter and encouraging others to join. For her, the message is clear.
“Being Jewish shouldn’t be something we hide,” she said. “Not in Spain. Not in New York. Not anywhere.”
Mayor Eric Adams hosted a Jewish heritage reception honoring Douglas Murray, Joseph Shamie, Victoria Zirkiev, and Shulem and Chavy Greenberg at Gracie Mansion on July 8. Ed Reed, Mayoral Photography Office
Monday, July 21, 3–7 PM
The Kleinman Family Ohel Regional Center
156 Beach 9th Street, 2nd Floor Far Rockaway, NY
on Seagirt Avenue
Summer backyard barbecues, strictly kosher WINE AND DINE
Barbecuing is primal, even dangerous. It’s looked on as a guy thing — all that fire, smoke, sharp implements and mountains of meat.
But hold on, folks! Women are drawn to that fire and smoke, too. Besides creating zesty marinades and scrumptious sides, complete with a dose of patience (think long, tenderizing brisket), women of all ages are influencing barbecue at home, opening popular restaurants and winning big on the professional circuit.
To tap into this growing trend, Jewish-run, kosher barbecue festivals are held during the warm-weather months from Memphis to Kansas to Texas and beyond. A few are returning this year after a pandemic-enforced absence.
Brisket — the cheap, tough cut of meat that has always been a star at Jewish holiday tables — comes with tenderizing recipes galore. It’s alleged that Central and Eastern European Jews ate brisket as far back as the 1700s, especially at Passover, when multiple courses are served. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, waves of immigrants to the Southwest and Texas area started to exchange ideas with ranchers on how to smoke the cheapest and most plentiful cuts of beef: brisket.
Brisket is no longer cheap, but the thrill of smoking, long and slow, and the resulting melt in the mouth meat is making smoked brisket the star of home barbecuing. It’s not for the faint hearted.
Smoking brisket takes time, dedication and a whole lotta love. How else can you explain an all-nighter where the temperature must remain around the 220-degree mark, with the meat judiciously turned and basted. Barbecue teams competing at events will start low-temperature cooking in late evening, jealously guarded and tended until early morning, when samples are presented to trained judges.
You’ll have full-scale mutiny, however. if kid and teenage “purists” can’t fill up on time-tested hamburgers, hot dogs and all the fixin’s.
Most anything can be cooked on the grill — from the wealth of seasonal veggies to chicken and fish. Barbecue corn with just a smattering of margarine or a touch of olive oil and seasonings, or jazz it up with your own fresh herb dressing. The same goes for zucchini, asparagus, onions, peppers or any other fresh vegetable (just make sure they’re all cut to a similar size so none burns).
Simply toss in olive oil and garlic, and sprinkle with freshly ground pepper and kosher salt. Place in a grilling basket, char slightly to caramelize, and you have a colorful, healthy, delicious vegetable platter. If there are leftovers, which are unlikely, serve next day at room temperature.
Fish and chicken are easy barbecue favorites. I serve steelhead trout weekly, winter or summer, though it tastes divine when grilled. Simply brush with good olive oil and sprinkle with seasonings. Place in a basket to avoid flaking. Along with omega-3s, it’s packed with protein, vitamins and is low in mercury. Chicken legs, wings or quarters may be marinated overnight for flavor and to retain moistness before grilling. The winning recipe below is from my husband, the late Dr. Walter Hofman.
And no barbecue is complete without a sumptuous summer dessert. Lazy Gal Berry Crisp is bright and crunchy, using the ripest fruit of the season. The topping? A few handfuls of granola. The recipe included below is a family favorite, packed with plump blueberries and ripe strawberries.
To some joyful summer eating!
Smoked Brisket (Meat)
There are as many smoked brisket recipes as there are cooks. This one, adapted from Epicurious, is very straightforward. Serves 10 to 12.
Cook’s Tips: •Order a whole brisket ahead of time. •Fat should be trimmed to about 1/4inch thick to prevent meat from drying out. •Soak wood chips in water overnight. •To get more smoke, without increasing heat, add dry wood chips to soaked chips. •Check wood chips often adding more soaked chips to keep smoke levels constant. •May substitute a favorite storebought rub.
Ingredients:
• 1/4 cup BBQ rub
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 7 to 8 lb. beef brisket
• Tishbi Onion Cabernet
Directions:
In a small bowl, mix the rub and brown sugar together. Place the brisket on a baking sheet. Sea-
son the brisket rubbing the sugar mixture all over. Let sit at room temperature for 1 hour. Heat the grill to 220 degrees. Adjust the heat as needed throughout cooking to maintain 220. After eight hours, insert an instant read thermometer into thickest part of meat. It should register 195 to 205 degrees. It may need to smoke a few hours longer.
Transfer to a carving board. Spoon Tishbi Onion Cabernet jelly over top. Let rest before slicing against the grain, about one-quarter-inch thick.
Doc Hofman’s Sweet-andHot Chicken Thighs (Meat)
Serves 6 to 8.
Cook’s Tips: •Save time and use bottled chopped garlic. •Chopped ginger root is available
in jars. •May use this marinade for chicken wings.
Ingredients:
• 1/2 cup ketchup
• 1/2 cup chili sauce
• 1/3 cup honey, warmed
• 1/4 cup molasses
• 2 Tbsp. Dijon mustard
• 2 Tbsp. orange marmalade, melted
• 1 Tbsp. grated ginger root
• 1 tsp. chopped garlic
• 3 lb. chicken thighs
Directions: Prepare sauce: In a bowl, combine all ingredients except chicken. Set aside. Place chicken in shallow glass bowl. Pour sauce over turning to coat all sides completely. Cover and
Summer backyard barbecues on
BBQ smoked beef brisket.
Christophe/Adobe
Lazy Gal’s Berry Crisp. Ethel G. Hofman
Chicken thighs on the grill.
Azurita/Adobe
ETHEl G. HofMAN
Summer backyard barbecues, strictly kosher…
Continued from page 14
refrigerate 4 to 6 hours or overnight.
Heat grill to about 300 degrees. Remove chicken thighs from marinade and discard marinade. Place chicken on grill. Cook for about 30 minutes with lid down, turning occasionally. When juices run clear when pricked with a fork, chicken is done. Serve hot off the grill.
Barbecued Steelhead Trout (Pareve)
Serves 6.
Cook’s Tips:
•May substitute salmon for steelhead trout. •Cut the fillet into steaks for faster cooking. •Remove visible pin bones with tweezers. •Brush grill rack generously with oil.
•May place trout on oiled aluminum foil to grill or use an oiled rimless baking sheet to slide fish fillet onto the grill and to remove when cooked.
Ingredients:
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
• 2 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger
• 2 tsp. bottled minced garlic
• 3 to 4 lb. steelhead trout fillet, skin on, pin bones removed
• Freshly ground pepper
Directions:
Prepare the sauce: In a small bowl, whisk together all the ingredients, except the trout and ground pepper.
Place the trout, skin-side down on a flat surface. Brush generously using all the sauce. Place on foil, or slide the trout onto a rimless baking sheet. Slip onto well-oiled grill rack. Sprinkle lightly with freshly ground pepper.
Cook over indirect heat with lid down. Cook for 25 minutes for a whole fillet, or 10 minutes to 15 minutes for steaks.
Fish is done when flakes are opaque when separated with a knife.
Apple-and-Jicama Coleslaw (Pareve)
Jicama is a cross between an apple and potato. Its thin brown skin must be removed before eating. Serves 6 to 8.
Cook’s Tips: •A bag of prepared greens saves time. •Toss apple in orange juice to avoid browning. •Shred jicama and apples in food processer fitted with a grating blade or shave jicama on a mandolin. •A simple, cheap mandolin is available online. •May refrigerate veggies and apples up to two hours before adding remaining ingredients.
Ingredients:
• 1 bag (about 14 oz.) shredded cabbage
• 1 medium jicama, peeled and coarsely shredded
• 2 Granny Smith apples, cored and coarsely shredded
• 2 Tbsp. snipped cilantro or parsley
• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 Tbsp. orange juice
• 2 Tbsp. seasoned rice-wine vinegar
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Directions: Place cabbage, jicama, apples and cilantro or parsley in a large bowl. Sprinkle with olive oil, juice and vinegar. Toss well. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Lazy Gal’s Berry Crisp (Dairy or Pareve)
For a post-brisket dessert, use the pareve recipe. But for the rest of the summer, go for the buttery richness. Serves 8 to 10.
Cook’s Tips: •May use all blueberries or a
mixture of berries and peaches. •Rinse berries and roll gently in a clean kitchen towel to remove moisture. •Top warm crisp with scoops of frozen yogurt or ice-cream (nondairy or soy-based if after meat).
Ingredients:
• 4 cups blueberries
• 2 cups strawberries, quartered
• 3 Tbsp. sugar
• 2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup orange juice
• 1 Tbsp. grated lemon rind
• 3 Tbsp. butter or margarine, melted
• 2 cups granola
Directions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray a 9-inch square baking dish with nonstick baking spray. Place all the ingredients, except butter or margarine and granola, in the baking dish. Toss to mix. Let stand at room temperature an hour or so. Bake, uncovered, in a preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until berry mixture begins to bubble. Remove from oven.
In a bowl, pour butter or margarine over granola. Mix well. Sprinkle over the berries. Bake 10 to 15 minutes longer, or until fruit is bubbly. If browning too quickly, cover loosely with aluminum foil. Serve warm.
Jicama. WikiCommons
Mandolin for shaving vegetables.
Ethel G. Hofman
Auditory interaction between plants and animals
In a world-first study, researchers at Tel Aviv University have discovered an acoustic interaction between plants and insects.
Focusing on female moths, the study found that the insects make critical decisions about where to lay their eggs based on sounds emitted by nearby plants. When plants emit ultrasonic distress signals — inaudible to the human ear but detectable by moths — the moths avoid them in favor of healthy, silent plants.
The study was conducted in the laboratories of professors Yossi Yovel from the School of Zoology and Lilach Hadany from the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at Tel Aviv University’s Wise Faculty of Life Sciences. It was led by students Rya Seltzer and Guy Zer Eshel, in collaboration with scientists from the Plant Protection Institute at the Volcani Institute. The findings were published in the journal eLife
The study builds on a groundbreaking discovery published by the same research team about two years ago, which revealed that plants under stress emit ultrasonic sounds — frequencies beyond human hearing but perceptible to many animals.
“After proving in the previous study that plants produce sounds, we hypothesized that animals capable of hearing these high-frequency sounds
may respond to them and make decisions accordingly,” said Yovel. “Specifically, we know that many insects, which have diverse interactions with the plant world, can perceive plant sounds. We wanted to investigate whether such insects actually detect and respond to these sounds.”
Hadany added that “we chose to focus on female moths, which typically lay their eggs on plants so that the larvae can feed on them once hatched. We assumed the females seek an optimal site to lay their eggs — a healthy plant that can properly nourish the larvae. Thus, when the plant signals that it is dehydrated and under stress, would the moths heed the warning and avoid laying eggs on it?”
In the first experiment, designed to isolate the auditory component from other plant characteristics such as color and scent, the researchers presented female moths with two boxes: one contained a speaker playing recordings of dehydrated tomato plants, while the other remained silent. The moths showed a clear preference for the ‘noisy’ box, which they likely interpreted as indicating the presence of a living plant, even if it was under stress.
The researchers concluded the moths do, in fact, perceive and respond to playback of plantemitted sounds. When moths’ hearing organs were neutralized, their preference disappeared, and
they chose between the two boxes equally — evidence that their original behavior was driven specifically by auditory cues rather than other stimuli.
In the second experiment, female moths were presented with two healthy tomato plants — one accompanied by a speaker playing the sounds of a drying plant and the other silent. Once again, the moths showed a clear preference, this time for the silent plant, which emitted no distress sounds.
In another experiment, the female moths were again presented with two boxes — one silent and the other containing male moths, which emit ultrasonic sounds at frequencies similar to those produced by plants. This time, the females showed no clear preference and laid their eggs equally in both boxes. The researchers concluded that, when deciding where to lay their eggs, female moths respond specifically to plant-emitted sounds rather than to similar sounds made by males.
“In this study, we revealed the first evidence of acoustic interaction between a plant and an insect. We are convinced, however, that this is just the beginning. Acoustic interaction between plants and animals doubtlessly exists in many more forms and serves a wide range of roles. This is a vast, unexplored field — an entire world waiting to be discovered,” the researchers said. —JNS
A female moth lays her eggs on a leaf. Tel Aviv University
Jewish Star Torah columnists: Rabbi Benny Berlin, spiritual leader of BACH Jewish Center in Long Beach; Rabbi Avi Billet of Anshei Chesed, Boynton Beach, FL, mohel and Five Towns native; Rabbi Binny Freedman, rosh yeshiva of Orayta, Jerusalem; Dr. Alan A. Mazurek, former ZOA chair, retired neurologist, living in Great Neck, Jerusalem and Florida.
Contributing writers: Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks zt”l, former chief rabbi of United Hebrew Congregations of British Commonwealth; Rabbi Yossy Goldman, president South African Rabbinical Association; Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, OU executive VP emeritus.
Five Towns Candlelighting: From the White Shul, Far Rockaway, NY
Scarsdale Candlelighting: From the Young Israel of Scarsdale, Scarsdale, NY
Here’s how Judaism has dealt with its zealots
With Pinchas, a new type enters the world of Israel: the zealot. “Pinchas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the Priest, has turned My anger away from the Israelites by being zealous with My zeal in their midst, so that I did not put an end to them in My zeal.” (Num. 25:11)
He was followed, many centuries later, by the one other figure in Tanach described as a zealot, the prophet Elijah, who tells G-d on Mount Horeb, “I have been very zealous for the L-rd, G-d Almighty” (1 Kings 19:14).
In fact, tradition identified and linked the two men even more closely: “Pinchas is Elijah” (Yalkut Shimoni, Torah, 771). Pinchas, says Targum Yonatan (to Num. 25:12), “became an angel who lives forever and will be the harbinger of redemption at the End of Days.”
What is truly fascinating is how Judaism — both biblical and post-biblical — dealt with the idea of the zealot. First, let us recall the two contexts.
First is that of Pinchas. Having failed to curse the Israelites, Bilaam eventually devised a strategy that succeeded. He persuaded the Moabite women to seduce Israelite men and then lure them into idolatry. This evoked intense Divine anger, and a plague broke out among the Israelites. To make matters worse, Zimri, a leader of the tribe of Shimon, brought a Midianite woman into the camp where they flagrantly engaged in intimacy.
Perhaps sensing that Moses felt powerless — he had himself married a Midianite woman — Pinchas seized the initiative and stabbed and killed them both, ending the misbehavior and the plague by which 24,000 Israelites had already died. That is the story of Pinchas.
Elijah’s story begins with the accession of Ahab to the throne of the northern kingdom, Israel. The king had married Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon, and under her influence introduced Baal worship into the kingdom, building a pagan temple
Nothing in the religious life is more risk-laden than zeal. As for vengeance, that belongs to G-d alone.
and erecting a pole in Samaria honoring the Ugaritic mother Goddess Asherah. Jezebel, meanwhile, was organizing a program of killing the “prophets of the L-rd.” The Bible (I King 16) says of Ahab that “he did more evil in the eyes of the L-rd than any of those before him.”
Elijah announced that there would be a drought to punish the king and the Baal-worshipping nation. Confronted by Ahab, Elijah challenged him to gather the 450 prophets of Baal to a test at Mount Carmel. When all assembled present, Elijah issued the challenge. The prophets would each prepare sacrifices and call on G-d, and so would Elijah. The one who summoned fire from heaven would confirm the true G-d. The Baal prophets agreed, made their preparations, and then called on their G-d, but nothing happened. In a rare show of scornful humor, Elijah told them to cry louder. Perhaps, he said, Baal is busy or travelling, or having a sleep.
The false prophets worked themselves into a frenzy, gashing themselves until their blood flowed, but still nothing happened. Elijah then prepared his sacrifice and had the people douse it three times with water to make it even harder to ignite. He then called on G-d. Fire descended from heaven, consuming the sacrifice. The people, awestruck, cried out, “The L-rd — He is G-d! The L-rd — He is G-d!” words we say nowadays at the climax of Neilah at the end of Yom Kippur. The people then executed the false prophets of Baal. G-d had been vindicated.
There can be no doubt that Pinchas and Elijah were religious heroes. They stepped into the breach at a time when the nation was facing religious and moral crisis and palpable Divine anger. They acted while everyone else, at best, watched. They risked their lives by so doing. There can be little doubt that the mob might have turned against them and attacked them. Both men acted for the sake of G-d and the religious welfare of the nation. And G-d Himself is called “zealous” many times in the Torah. Yet their treatment in both the written and oral Torah is deeply ambivalent.
G-d gives Pinchas “my covenant of peace,” meaning that he will never again have to act the part of a zealot. Indeed, in Judaism, the shedding of human blood is incompatible with service at the Sanctuary (King David was forbidden to build the Temple for this reason: see I Chronicles 22:8, 28:3). As for Elijah, he was implicitly rebuked by G-d in one of the great scenes of the Bible. Standing at Horeb, G-d shows him a whirlwind, an earthquake and a fire, but G-d is not in any of these. Then He comes to Elijah in a “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19). He then asks Elijah, for the second time, “What are you doing here?” and Elijah replies in exactly the same words as he had
used before: “I have been very zealous for the L-rd G-d Almighty.”
Elijah has not understood that G-d was trying to tell him that He is not to be found in violent confrontation, but in gentleness and the word softly spoken. G-d then tells him to appoint Elisha as his successor.
Pinchas and Elijah are, in other words, both gently rebuked by G-d.
Halachically, the precedent of Pinchas is severely limited. Although his act was lawful, the Sages nonetheless said that had Zimri turned around and killed Pinchas instead, he would be deemed innocent since he would have acted in self-defense.
Had Pinchas killed Zimri even one moment after the act of immorality, he would have been guilty of murder. And had Pinchas asked a court of law whether he was permitted to do what he was about to do, the answer would have been no. This is a rare instance of the rule, halachah ve-ein morin kein, “It is a law that is not taught” (Sanhedrin 82a).
Why this moral ambivalence? The simplest answer is that the zealot is not acting within the normal parameters of the law.
Zimri may have committed a sin that carried the death sentence, but Pinchas executed punishment without a trial. Elijah may have been acting under the imperative of removing idolatry from Israel, but he did an act — offering a sacrifice outside the Temple — normally forbidden in Jewish law.
There are extenuating circumstances in Jewish law in which either the king or the court may execute non-judicial punishment
to secure social order (see Maimonides, Hilchot Sanhedrin 24:4; Hilchot Melachim 3:10).
But Pinchas was neither a king nor acting as a representative of the court. He was acting on his own initiative, taking the law into his own hands (avid dina lenafshei). There are instances where this is justified and where the consequences of inaction would be catastrophic. But in general, we are not empowered to do so, since the result would be lawlessness and violence on a grand scale.
More profoundly, the zealot is in effect taking the place of G-d. As Rashi says, commenting on the phrase, “Pinchas ... has turned My anger away from the Israelites by being zealous with My zeal,” Pinchas “executed My vengeance and showed the anger I should have shown” (Rashi to Num. 25:11).
In Judaism, we are commanded to “walk in G-d’s ways” and imitate His attributes. “Just as He is merciful and compassionate, so you be merciful and compassionate.”
That is not, however, the case when it comes to executing punishment or vengeance. G-d who knows all may execute sentence without a trial, but we, being mere humans, may not. There are forms of justice that are G-d’s domain, not ours.
The zealot who takes the law into his own hands is embarking on a course of action fraught with moral danger. Only the most holy may do so, only once in a lifetime, and only in the direst circumstance when the nation is at risk, when there is nothing else to
Continuing our search for a covenant of peace
Rabbi bennY beRLin Long Beach
During the summer, many families look forward to fireworks, gathering together to watch the night sky light up. But for one member of our shul, it was different this year. He served in the IDF and was deeply impacted by what he witnessed after October 7. He told me he hadn’t even realized the extent of his stress until he found himself tense and on edge during the fireworks. The loud, sudden bursts brought him back to moments no one should have to live through.
We can’t begin to grasp the weight carried by the soldiers of the IDF. They put their lives on the line to protect others, to save lives, and to restore safety to our people. And I thought to myself: this man should be blessed with the bris shalom, the covenant of peace, just like Pinchas in this week’s parsha. Pinchas steps into a
Need
moment of violence, takes courageous action to stop a national tragedy, and in response, G-d gives him something rare and precious, a blessing of peace.
The Sforno offers a deep explanation of what this peace really meant. He writes that Pinchas lived for hundreds of years. How? Because his body no longer experienced internal conflict.
The Sforno says that all physical deterioration comes from “confrontations between opposites.” What does that mean? When our bodies are in tension, when there is conflict, that stress wears down the body.
In the book, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” Dr. Robert Sapolsky explains that chronic stress damages the body over time. It suppresses the immune system, raises blood pressure, harms the heart, and even kills neurons in the brain.
He writes in simple terms, “Stress can make us sick.” If you experience every day as an emergency, you will pay the price. The mindbody connection is real and powerful. And the Sforno saw it centuries ago: if someone has inner peace, the body will live longer.
The soldier had a moment of peace. He deserves that peace.
So how do we move toward that kind of peace in our own lives? I want to share three Torah-based strategies for handling stress and building what the Torah calls a bris shalom.
The first is taking care of our bodies as a mitzvah. The Torah tells us, “u’shmartem me’od es nafshoseichem (you must protect your life).”
The Rambam, writing hundreds of years before modern health trends, emphasized diet, sleep, exercise, and balance. These are not luxuries. They are mitzvos. Our bodies, which house a soul, must be treated as sacred.
Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik, while recovering from a stroke, was once seen doing physical therapy while softly reciting achas, achas ve’achas, the words of the Yom Kippur service.
For him, healing was part of his service to G-d. We must treat our health with the same reverence.
The second is building emunah. So much of stress is the feeling that we are alone in a world that is too much for us. But prayer reminds us otherwise.
When we take three steps forward in Shemoneh Esrei, we enter a different space, a place where we are not carrying everything by ourselves.
The Kuzari says that prayer is like a daily Shabbos. A pause. A reset. Speaking to G-d is one of the most powerful ways to relieve the pressure we carry. It is not just asking for things; it is handing over what is too heavy. We are not in this alone.
The third is learning not to be consumed by what might happen. So much of our stress comes from imagining the worst. The Midrash says that Sarah Imeinu died when she saw a vision of Avraham with the knife over Yitzchak. She thought the worst had happened. But it hadn’t. It was not a tragedy; it was a moment
Berlin on page 26
something? If you don’t ask, you don’t get
Rabbi YossY GoLDman
S. African Rabbinical Assn.
Does anyone think feminism was conceived in the 1960s? Long before anyone dreamed of it, the very first feminists appeared in the Bible. And they make their dramatic entry in this week’s Torah reading, Pinchas
As the discussions began concerning the future distribution of the promised land to the 12 tribes of Israel, five sisters approached Moses with a request. They were the daughters of Tzelafchad, and their father died without any sons to inherit his share. They were quite direct, even demanding, in their dialogue with Moses.
“Our father died here in the desert … he had no sons. Why should our father’s name be omitted from his family because he had no son? Give us a possession of the land together with our father’s brothers.”
Moses himself was uncertain as to what the law was, so he approached the Almighty directly. Indeed, G-d gave Moses a new chapter in the laws of inheritance. “If a man dies and has no son, you should transfer his inheritance to his daughter.”
And so it was for posterity that women were empowered in Jewish law. But it wasn’t
The Lubavitcher Rebbe said ‘want’ isn’t only a desire but a need.
until those five sisters took the initiative and approached Moses with their request.
The obvious question is, why did they have to make their demands at all? Why didn’t G-d give that law when He gave Moses the basic laws of inheritance? Why did it have to wait for these sisters to come and be bold and strident enough to state their case? Surely, it should have been included in the laws from the very beginning.
And the answer advanced by our sages is that there are times when G-d waits to see if we really want something. How important is it to us? How genuine is our longing for it? Only when we demonstrate our sincere desire does He respond in kind.
There is a similar situation earlier in Chapter 9 of the book of Numbers. Some people could not participate in the Paschal offering through no fault of their own, and they, too, approached Moses, using al-
most the same words as the daughters of Tzelafchad, “Why should we lose out?”
So there, G-d gave Moses the law of the Second Passover. Why did it have to wait for those people to come and make their demands? For the very same reason. G-d was waiting to see if they truly desired it.
Of course, G-d always knows our thoughts and desires even before we express ourselves. Yet, He decided that this should be the paradigm.
This same idea expresses itself in many areas of life. “G-d helps those who help themselves” is an old proverb with much truth. G-d does not want us to wait for Him to make things happen. We must do whatever we can, and He will surely respond and bring the project to fruition. “And G-d will bless you in all that you do,” it says in Deuteronomy (15:18). Yes, He will bless us, but we must do our part
Goldman on page 26
Pinchas lesson: Safeguarding against extremism
Rabbi DR. tzvi
heRsh weinReb Orthodox Union
Astory with important implications for our own times is referred to in the opening passage of this week’s Torah portion, Pinchas.
The background to the story is described in detail in last week’s parsha, Balak. It is a sad tale, a shameful tale, but unfortunately a true tale.
It is a blatant description of decadence and grave immorality. The Israelites are attracted to the daughters of Moab. They join them in festive offerings to the G-ds of Moab, chief of whom was the Baal Peor, thus angering the L-rd. Suddenly, an Israelite man intimately embraces a Midianite woman in public; indeed, in
Rav Kook insisted that we are a nation and not just a religion.
the very presence of Moshe and the entire assembly. All are shocked, paralyzed, tearful.
Pinchas son of Elazar, son of Aharon the Kohen, sees the scene, and immediately, spontaneously, leaps up, spear in hand, and fatally pierces the bodies of both the Israelite man and the woman.
Things quiet down and thus concludes last week’s narrative.
This Shabbat, as we open our Chumashim, we discover the sequel to last week’s disastrous drama. We become informed that the L-rd spoke to Moshe with words of praise for Pinchas for having removed His wrath from the Children of Israel. The L-rd affirms:
“Therefore, proclaim that I grant him My Covenant — peace!”
How are we to react to the story and to the sequel? Some of us may feel compelled to applaud Pinchas for his bravery and holy zealotry in defense of the Almighty and the honor of His people. Others might find his zealotry excessive and perhaps unduly impulsive.
Still others might adopt the reaction described in the Jerusalem Talmud (Sanhedrin chapter 9, paragraph 7):
Some say that zealots are permitted to attack those who consort with Aramean women; but we are taught that this is not the policy of the Sages and that Pinchas acted against the will of
the Sages. Rabbi Judah ben Pazi insisted that the Sages sought to excommunicate Pinchas but were prevented by the instantaneous intervention of the Holy Spirit granting him, and his descendants, the eternal covenant of priestly peace.
The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 82a) delves into this issue at some length. I find this Talmudic passage to be particularly relevant to our times. This is because what biblical and rabbinic sources call kanaut, zealotry, is awfully close to what we call extremism. Thus, whatever the Talmud can teach us about ways to safeguard against zealotry can help us modify, and eventually control, extremism, whether it be left-wing extremism or right-wing extremism, in political affairs or in religious ideology.
The voice of several of the “safeguards” against illegitimate zealotry in the Talmudic passage just mentioned is the great second century sage, known simply as “Rav”. He outlines three such safeguards:
1. The would-be zealot must be absolutely confident that his zealous intentions conform to halacha. That is, that they are consistent with the standards of justice and have judicial precedent. In Pinchas’ case, “ra’ah maaseh v’nizkar halacha, he observed an act, and recalled a halachic precedent.”
2. That he has no personal bias against the
offenders that would motivate his zealotry, that his motives were pure, unselfish, and unprejudiced.
3. That he acts spontaneously, without prior consultation with some neutral expert advisor. After all, “ha’ba l’himalech ein morin lo, had he consulted with an authority he would have been advised NOT to do so.”
Only if these three conditions are met can he be excused and even complimented for his zealous outburst.
There is a fourth condition which can justify zealotry, a condition which I would describe as “cultural context.” It is enunciated by one of the supreme halachic authorities of the previous century, known as the Chazon Ish, Rav Avraham Yeshaya Kerelitz, zt”l, in his discussion of the laws of ritual slaughter. He refers to a Talmudic ruling which condones very severe punishment for one who violates certain Torah prohibitions.
He notes that such harsh punishments could only be applied in times when the cultural context was one of universal piety and faithful commitment to all halachic restrictions. Then the outlier, as part of a minute minority, could be held accountable for his failure to conform to society at large. In our times, argues the Chazon
Weinreb on page 26
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OPINION COLUMNISTS
Ben Cohen, senior analyst, Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Stephen Flatow, president Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995; Yisrael Medad, American-born Israeli journalist and political commentator; Rafael Medoff, founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies; Melanie Phillips, British journalist; Thane Rosenbaum, Distinguished University Professor at Touro University (published by Jewish Journal); Jonathan S. Tobin, editor-in-chief, Jewish News Syndicate.
Why teachers’ unions are at war with Israel
JONATHAN
JNS
OEditor-in-Chief
n the list of professions that inspire the most respect among Americans, teachers rank very high. According to Gallup, only nurses scored higher than educators in its annual poll concerning opinions about the professions.
That’s why it may have come as a surprise to casual observers when they heard news that the National Education Association — the nation’s largest teachers’ union — had cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League because of ADL’s insistence on opposing antisemitism.
No one should be surprised.
Captured by the left
America’s teachers’ unions —national organizations like the NEA and its rival, the American Federation of Teachers, and most local associations that represent educators — have long been captured by leftist ideologues. That has put them at the forefront of partisan politics, making them among the largest donors to Democratic Party candidates, as well as liberal and leftist advocacy groups.
In addition to their role as a partisan interest group, these unions have become an integral part of the culture war roiling American society as so-called progressives have sought to topple the Western canon in the US education system and replace it with a woke secular faith based on a neo-Marxist obsession with race.
The unions have become, like the pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses, the lynchpin of the surge in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred that has spread across the country in recent years. Our attention has understandably been focused
Progressives who think Jews are
‘white’
oppressors have captured the education establishment.
on those chanting for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”). That has led to a counter-attack from the Trump administration, which has sought to defund elite universities like Harvard and Columbia that tolerate and encourage antisemitism.
But operating largely without the sort of publicity and scrutiny that has zeroed in on the targeting of Jews in academia, teachers’ unions, whose members staff the nation’s K-12 school systems, have played a key role in mainstreaming blood libels against Israel, falsely labeling Zionism as a form of racism, and denying Jewish peoplehood and history.
Why have teachers become the shock troops of the intersectional left?
Their unions are led by hard-left activists like Randi Weingarten of the AFT, and as a consequence, have done far more harm to the nation’s students than good.
Toxic theories
The context is a broad conflict about how Americans should think about their country and Western civilization. Most teachers — and their unions — are squarely in the progressive camp that has embraced the left-wing critique of the West. As a consequence, they have been indoctrinating a generation of young Americans to buy into the toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism in which the United States is wrongly depicted as an irredeemably racist nation.
These divisive doctrines label Jews and Israelis as “white” oppressors always in the wrong, and Palestinians as downtrodden “people of color,” who are in the right no matter what they do.
That’s a completely false understanding of the century-old war to oppose the Jewish presence in the land of Israel, which has nothing to do with race. Yet it has led to their believing that Israelis — the victims of the horrendous terrorism of Oct. 7, 2023, and a war waged against their existence by Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi terrorist proxies — are the villains of the Middle East conflict. And that inevitably means that the Palestinian Arabs — the perpetrators of the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, led by groups bent on genocide — are the good guys.
That’s the context for the NEA’s break with the ADL.
That these two groups should be at odds
with each other is not so much ironic as it is a sign of the radicalization of the unions.
betrayed by their allies
In recent years, under the leadership of CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has, like the unions and other liberal groups, moved to the left and often acted as a Jewish auxiliary for the Democratic Party rather than sticking to its mission of defending the Jews.
It played partisan politics on some issues — and then not only endorsed the antisemitic Black Lives Matter movement but also incorporated some of the far-left’s woke ideology into its popular “No Place for Hate” curricula it markets to school districts.
After the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism, however, Greenblatt and the ADL seem to have at least to some extent remembered why the group was founded and is still needed. They responded to the crisis by returning to their roots, often calling out the antisemitism on college campuses and elsewhere. And they continued to advocate for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism that rightly cites the
sort of double standards, blood libels and opposition to the existence of one Jewish state on the planet that is now routine on the left.
It is hardly surprising that the ADL’s old allies have not merely turned on them, but now refer to them with the same rage as they do Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces. In much the same manner as leftists target Jews on campuses, for them, the only good Jews are those on the far left who are willing to disavow their own people and oppose Israel’s existence and even support those, like Hamas, who seek Jewish genocide. Since the ADL opposes those seeking to kill Jews and Israelis, the NEA believes that it’s wrong to allow the group to help it define or counter antisemitism. Indeed, as one such Hamas apologist/NEA activist put it, the unions regard a group like ADL, which supports Israel, as being akin to fossil-fuel companies they loudly insist are destroying the planet. Unsurprisingly, the openly antisemitic Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) endorsed their vote.
The NEA’s move is just one in an increasingly lengthy list of actions in which educaiton unions have aligned themselves
S. TObIN
Thousands march through near City Hall in Chicago during the 11th day of an ongoing teachers strike on Oct. 31, 2019. Scott Heins, Getty Images via JNS
They are all our children. Enough is enough. Is one life more important than another? Jewish Star columnist who voted for this Israeli government — and backed it — says it’s time to move beyond failed leaders and win the war.
DR. ALAN MAZUREK
Jewish Star
columnist
We have all been extraordinarily proud of the incredible achievements of the Israeli and American governments in tackling the existential threat of a nuclear Iran. While there is still much work to be done, those of us who realize that all is in the hands of Hashem, recognize that the success of Tzahal and the American military forces could not have been possible without siyatta d’shmaya, the help of heaven. Prime Minister Netanyahu has used those very words in his speech to the nation and President Trump has acknowledged the divine hand in his successes.
But sadly, the original conflict, in Gaza against the evil Hamas, drags on at terrible cost to the Jewish nation.
For reasons that will soon become apparent, I’ve been hesitant to write this column for the longest time. I was hoping never to have to write it but events of the last two months and now July have forced me to reassess my position.
In the election of 2022, I voted for this government. Since then, I’ve supported it and have argued that its leadership, though flawed, was the best choice we had, particularly in the midst of a war.
I no longer feel that way.
The reasons are two-fold, and while some may think they have to do with court reform and charedi conscription, those extremely contentious issues are only peripherally related to my decision.
The first has to do with the value of human life in a Jewish society, in Israeli society, and how we measure it and how we treasure it. We are the people who are enjoined to “Choose Life (u’vacharta b’Chaim)” (Devarim 30:19 ). But what if there are two compelling and vital “lives” that require a choice?
The Talmud and subsequent poskim discuss this at length. Say you have two lives — for example, you are told to kill so and so or I will kill you or your child. Are you permitted to kill that person? Of course not, as the Talmud concludes, “Another’s blood is no more red than yours or any other’s” (Pesachim 25b, Yoma 82b, Sanhedrin 74a).
By the same reasoning, you don’t have to give up your life to save another. We are not required and in fact are forbidden to make “Sophie’s choice.”
Iknow I’m oversimplifying here, because this is not a halachic treatise, but you get the general point — one life is not more important than any other. Though I’ve been thinking about this conundrum for the entire length of the war, the past two plus months have brought it into stark reality.
It is estimated that there are 20 living hostages in Gaza. The month of May saw eight soldiers killed, the month of June another 20, and as of July 14, already 8 soldiers have been killed, with many more seriously wounded. All killed by cowardly, vicious Hamas barbarians, not in open battle but by booby-traps and IED’s, most in the area of Beit Hanoun and Khan Yunis. The soldiers have been painstakingly taking more Gazan territory, to pressure Hamas to release more hostages in a “deal” or hopefully reveal and uncover these hostages on their own. The IDF is purposely not “bombing the hell” out of those areas so as not to mistakenly kill hostages, but rather going slowly,
building by building and area by area. But this puts these soldiers at tremendous risk, as can be seen by the events of the last 60+ days.
Though to ask the question is nauseating and distasteful in the extreme, how many soldiers must die before it is concluded that this technique is not working and may in fact be halachically wrong. Twenty? Forty? Onehundred?
If I were the parent, chalilah, of a hostage, I would want everything done to bring my child home; but as the parent of a soldier I would want everything done to bring my child home as well.
One may argue, as some halachic authorities do, that soldiers are different, that’s what they signed up for, everything they do is a potential deadly risk. (HaRav Eliezer Melamed of the Har Bracha community in “HaAm V’HaAretz,” part of the multi-volume “Peninei Halacha” series.)
But how do we define that? Are they required to go on suicide missions to achieve an almost elusive goal? Add to that the fact that respected government sources have quietly confirmed that Israel knows where the hostages are, but they are held in areas that are either booby-trapped or surrounded by Hamas forces committed to killing them if the IDF gets too close.
Hamas last month goaded Israel that the IDF is getting too close and if they get any closer they will kill hostage Matan Zangauker.
How viable is a war of attrition knowing your enemy has no way of winning but has nothing to lose by killing your soldiers as you try to rescue hostages they are determined to kill anyway — that their definition of “victory” is to kill as many Jews as they can, whether they ultimately survive or not?
Wouldn’t it be better at this point to make a decision that overwhelming force must be used to annihilate the enemy, knowing that, G-d forbid, some or perhaps all the hostages might be killed but that we’d at last bring an end to this endless bloodshed with a full victory?
Notice I say fight on till full victory — no ceasefire or surrender. On that Judaism is clear (HaRav Melamed). The enemy of the Jewish people must be crushed. The question is what price will be paid and how it should be done. Which returns us to the original question — is one life more valuable than another?
That question and others requires leadership, both secular and religious, and sadly in both areas we are sorely lacking. Which brings me to the second reason that I am questioning my support of this government.
Ijust finished reading the summary of a preliminary report on the failures of October 7, both before and after the start of the war, written by Jonathan Foreman, lead interviewer and primary author of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on UK-Israel published in the May 2025 issue of Commentary magazine.
Many have previously heard bits and pieces of the depressing debacle that resulted in October 7, but reading in black and white of the failures of leadership, political and military; failures of preparedness; failures of response; failures of hubris and bigotry — are so shocking that it brings one first to confusion, then outrage, then tears. Nevertheless I still recommend you read it.
My conclusion is that
•every government leader — right, left or center — in office or power at the outbreak of October 7 war must resign
•every military officer from the rank of colonel and above who had operational responsibility
•every senior intelligence official, with a few rare exceptions must resign.
I have lost confidence in this government to lead and continue to prosecute this war properly and to make appropriate decisions regarding the thorny question I raised above. Instead, a national task force of political, military and, yes, religious leaders must be brought into emergency session to address how to prosecut this war to a successful conclusion with a minimal loss of life.
I include religious leadership because, as I’ve often pointed out, everything is in the Tanach and Tanach is a guidepost for us on how to proceed.
An appropriate example illustrates this.
It’s the story of King David at Ziklag, little known to even those familiar with the Prophets. Shmuel 1, Chapter 30, recounts of how David Hamelech returned with his men to his home in Ziklag, an area in what we today call the Gaza envelope (possibly the area of Kibbutz Nir Oz).
The first king of Israel, Shaul had just been killed in battle and David had already been anointed the new king by Shmuel Hanavi months earlier. David found to his dismay that Ziklag had been burned to the ground, his wives and children and those of his men taken hostage by Amalekites. The navi states, “They cried till they could cry no more” (30:4). The parallels to our current day are striking.
At first David’s men are so incensed they want to stone David, but he regains his composure, calms them, consults Evyatar, the Kohen Gadol, and requests the Urim v’Tumin. He in-
quires of Hashem, should I go after the Amalekites, and He answers, “Yes, and you will be victorious.”
He his men go off immediately to battle. They find the Amalekites parading their captives while dancing and making merry, flush with victory (again, the parallels to our day are incredible). David slaughters the Amalekites and brings the captives home safely.
What can we learn from this?
The wags among you will say, sure, he had a direct line to G-d, a guaranteed victory. What’s more he didn’t have to face drones and IED’s and tunnel warfare. But that misses the point. David realized he must act quickly and turned to G-d. He did not delay.
I focus on that because one of the many failures mentioned in the scathing report published in Commentary is that it took three weeks for ground forces to enter Gaza after October 7. This was because “the IDF lacked soldiers who were ready to take part in intense urban warfare — and had to train up infantry and armor battalions so that they could carry out the mission.”
Despite multiple smaller wars with Hamas over several years, the Israeli army was woefully unprepared (in fact, that’s also why it took hours for the IDF to respond and reach the Israeli communities on the Gaza border on October 7).
Those three weeks turned out to be crucial, allowing Hamas to hide hostages in tunnels and all over Gaza, while also killing many more.
It’s true that we don’t have the Urim V’Tumim, but Hashem gave us His instruction manual, the Tanach, if we’d only bother to consult it.
I am not asking for a panel of inquiry to assess the causes of the massive, multiple failures related to October 7. That must come and will come, later, with full accountability and blame laid where it must.
But right now, we need a gathering of our best and brightest.
Most importantly those who can be guided by our Torah and Nach (the nevi’im and ketuvim) and by centuries of Talmudic and Halachic responsa that deal with the issue of successful prosecution and conclusion of war, in conjunction with military experts.
So we no longer have to make this awful, “Sophie’s choice.” We’ve lost too many precious souls. Enough is enough.
Shabbat shalom.
Dr. Alan A. Mazurek is a retired neurologist, living in Great Neck, Jerusalem and Florida. He is a former chairman of the ZOA. To reach him, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Left: Israeli soldiers are pictured during recent operations in the Gaza Strip (IDF photo). Right: Keith Siegel, a former hostage, and families of those still held by Hamas at a Knesset meeting on July 8 (Chaim Goldberg, Flash90 photo).
Unity: Most powerful weapon in Israel’s arsenal
The State of Israel has always lived by the principle that its survival depends not only on military might but on the unity of its people. A review of Israel’s modern military history — from the existential wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 to more recent conflicts in Lebanon, Gaza and the 2025 strike on Iran — reveals a clear pattern: when Israeli society stands united, its military achieves clarity and strength; when it is divided, outcomes are murky, costly and inconclusive.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the traumatic aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists launched a surprise attack on Israeli communities near the Gaza border. In that darkest of moments, the deep divisions that had wracked Israeli society for months over judicial reforms and political polarization were, at least temporarily, set aside. The country responded with a surge of unity not seen in decades.
In 1948, as five Arab armies invaded the fledgling Jewish state, political and ideological factions inside Israel set aside their rivalries to form the Israel Defense Forces. That
Debate did not break national unity, but it tested it.
unity saved the country.
In the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Israelis rallied behind the goal of ending fedayeen attacks and reopening the Straits of Tiran, which had been closed by Egypt in an attempt to strangle Israeli shipping. The operation was militarily successful — swift and focused — because the public and leadership were aligned.
The 1967 Six-Day War was a textbook example of national unity in the face of an existential threat. Israelis across the political and religious spectrum believed they were facing possible annihilation. When the IDF launched a preemptive strike and achieved one of the most decisive victories in military history, it was not just because of tactics; it was because the country was unified behind the necessity of action.
Even in the shock of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel was caught unprepared, the mobilization of society, especially reservists, reflected an unshakable national instinct: We fight together, or we do not survive.
By contrast, the First and Second Lebanon Wars in 1982 and 2006 showed the dangers of strategic drift. In 1982, Israel entered Lebanon to expel the PLO, but the war expanded into a quagmire, losing public support. By 2006, in the wake of Hezbollah’s provocations and the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, the IDF entered Lebanon again — but the war was marked by confused objectives, poor preparation and internal criticism.
Gaza brought its own set of challenges.
“Operation Cast Lead” from 2008-09 and “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014 were tactical successes but strategic stalemates. Military leaders knew how to degrade Hamas’s infrastructure, but public opinion, international pressure and political infighting made it difficult to define or pur-
sue victory. In 2021, internal unrest among Israeli Arabs in cities like Lod and Acre suggested a deeper fracture: not just a divided government but a society struggling to maintain cohesion at home while fighting enemies abroad.
Then came Oct. 7, 2023. The brutal massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis and the cap-
ture of more than 250 Israelis and other civilians by Hamas fighters shattered illusions and stunned the nation. But it also produced a near-instantaneous response: national unity. Tens of thousands of IDF reservists, including many living overseas, rushed back to serve. Airports were flooded with returning
New deicide: Proclaiming Jesus a ‘Palestinian’
The ubiquitous propaganda that Jesus was “Palestinian” is simultaneously laughably absurd and deadly serious. It is repeated by influencers, activists, even elected officials and clergy — without irony and with substantial passion and intent. And it is no innocent misreading of ancient history. It is a deliberate inversion, weaponized to justify violence and erase a people — Jesus’ people, the Jews.
Let us start with the facts. Jesus was a Jew. He was born to Jewish parents, lived in Judea, worshipped in the Jewish Temple and was crucified by the Roman Empire under its occupation of the Jewish homeland.
Not only was Jesus not a “Palestinian,” the term “Palestine” did not even exist during his lifetime. It was invented by the Romans nearly a century after his death — when, in 135 CE, they renamed Judea as “Palaestina” after crushing the Jewish Bar Kochba revolt. The Roman goal was to humiliate the rebellious
The impulse that transforms an iconic Jew into a ‘Palestinian’ also seeks to sever Jews from their ancestral homeland.
Jews by erasing the name of their homeland and replacing it with that of the Jews’ ancient enemies, the Philistines.
Arabs would not arrive in Judea/Palaestina until 600 years after Jesus’ life, during the 7th-century Islamic conquests. And “Palestinian” would not be used to describe non-Jewish residents of the region until 2000 years after Jesus, most of those residents having arrived from across the Middle East and North Africa during the preceding decades, looking for work from the nascent Jewish revival in the land.
So, no — Jesus was not a Palestinian. Unless, of course, “Palestinian” is simply a Roman slur for “Jew.” In that case, Jesus was a Palestinian — and so are today’s Jews: the indigenous people of the Land of Israel.
But that’s not what the modern narrative means. It is a campaign echoed in international bodies like UNESCO, designating ancient Jewish sites — such as the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — as “Muslim heritage sites.”
It is reinforced by media outlets and Middle East Studies departments that erase millennia of Jewish history by referring to these locations by their Arabic names or framing Jewish presence as an “encroachment” or “occupation.”
The same impulse that transforms the most iconic Jew in history into a “Palestinian” also seeks to sever Jews from their ancestral homeland, rewrite scripture and archaeology and retroactively de-Judaize Judaism’s holiest places.
Today, calling Jesus a “Palestinian” isn’t an act of historical solidarity. It is the foundation for a modern political dogma of transposition. In this new narrative, Israel is not just a coun-
try — it is the avatar of cosmic evil. Jews are not just citizens — they are the guilty embodiment of oppression.
And Palestinians are not just a population — they are a sacred symbol, a redemptive Christ-figure onto whom all suffering, innocence and virtue are projected. This is the new deicide. And “Free Palestine” is the new auto-da-fé.
It is not a literal charge of killing G-d; it is the subversion of all moral categories.
•Good is evil. Evil is good.
•The victim is the aggressor.
•The terrorist is the martyr.
The Jews, restored in their ancient homeland in the most remarkable act of indigenous revival in human history, are cast
IDF troops operating in the Gaza Strip on April 12. IDF
Pope Francis surveys the Nativity scene at the Vatican featuring a baby Jesus displayed on a keffiyeh, gifted by the Palestinian Higher Committee of Churches Affairs, as part of the “Nativity of Bethlehem 2024.”
stephen M. Flatow
JeFF
BallaBon
We are Zionists.
The 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av (Sat night and Sun, Aug 2-3) is the saddest in Jewish history, commemorating the destruction of our Temples on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (now occupied by the Dome of the Rock). The Kotel (the Temple’s remnant, its Western retaining Wall), is the holiest place accessible to Jews today.
Through the millennia, Jews have recited Psalm 137: ‘If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem (Zion) in memory even at my happiest hour.’
We are not ‘settler colonial’ interlopers in the Land of Israel; we are the indigenous nation of the Land, having returned home to the Jewish state of Israel and to Zion (Jerusalem). Even as we pray for the ultimate Redemption after nearly 2,000 years of exile, we thank G-d for bringing us home to Zion.
Nazi chic and soft-soaping the Jew-baiters
Let’s conduct a thought experiment.
•Imagine that Nazism had broken out of its wartime German-dominated confines and had become the creed of millions throughout the West.
•Imagine that, for the past 21 months, the streets of London, New York and other Western cities had become forests of Nazi flags as hundreds of thousands of people marched for the ethnic cleansing of Jews — mob events justified as exercising the “right to free speech.”
•Imagine that thousands of young people waving the Nazi flag at a rally in England had chanted “Death, death to the Jews!” while a demagogue leapt around the stage whipping the crowd up to a delirium.
•Imagine that the only way to gain social or professional acceptance was to agree that the Jews deliberately killed babies and starved people to death, that they were destroying society and that they must be treated accordingly as pariahs.
•Imagine that trade unions representing teachers, doctors and public-sector workers
The Palestine flag is a banner rallying calls for the extermination of the Jews.
supporting the Nazi party all passed resolutions calling for Jews to be boycotted. Imagine that shops in Britain displayed signs on their doors saying “No Jews welcome.”
•Imagine that the swastika had become a fashion accessory, printed onto casual clothing or painted onto people’s faces — or that when turning up for a hospital appointment, you saw that the nurse was wearing on her uniform a swastika pin.
•Imagine that the United Nations had become an arm of the Nazi party, and that its Special Rapporteur on the Jewish Question had stated that Jews who had been slaughtered had brought this upon themselves, that the Nazis had a right to murder them, and that the Jews were running the US Congress, the media and the universities.
All these things have happened, with one obvious difference — that instead of the Nazi party, they have been in support of the Palestinian cause and against Zionism, the State of Israel and the Jews who are assumed to support it.
For most Diaspora Jews, this onslaught has been felt as an existential threat.
They don’t view what’s been happening as support for a Palestine state or even as merely hatred of Israel. They see the Palestine flag as a banner rallying calls for the extermination of the Jews.
That’s because the Palestinian Arabs don’t merely aim to destroy the State of Israel — they aim to steal the Jews’ own history in the land by appropriating it for themselves. It’s an attempt to destroy Judaism itself, demonstrated by the fact that, day in, day out, Palestinian society preaches “death to the Jews.”
That’s why the Palestine flag — now so ubiquitous throughout the West as a grotesque statement of idealism — causes so
many Jews to shudder at it as a latter-day swastika.
This analogy with Nazism is not a farfetched flight of fancy. The Palestinian Arabs are the literal heirs to the Nazi party.
They were first incited to the genocide of the Jews by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who entered into an alliance with Adolf Hitler and pledged to exterminate every Jew in the Middle East.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose doctorate was in Holocaust denial, has publicly hailed al-Husseini as his role model. Sermons, pamphlets and cartoons pumped out by the PA are riddled with
deranged and paranoid images straight out of the Nazi play-book demonizing Jews as blood-suckers, parasites, vermin or octopuses trapping the world in their tentacles.
These images, which have indoctrinated generations of Palestinian Arabs into a hysterical and murderous hatred of Jews, seem just like Nazi propaganda because they are
As Pierre Rehov has documented in his important film, “Palestine: Invention of a Nation,” it was the Nazis who taught the Arabs of pre-Israel Palestine the language of Jewish demonization. He states that, although the virus of antisemitism was already
See Phillips on page 27
Not bombing Auschwitz and our bombing Iran
Amajor front-page article in the New York Times this week strongly criticized Israel’s bombing of an Iranian torture center, even going so far as to suggest that the Israeli strike may have been a war crime. One wonders how the Times would have responded if the United States had done to Auschwitz what Israel did to the barbaric Evin prison in Tehran.
While Evin was not a death camp, and the brutalization of prisoners there was not another Holocaust, the bombing and its aftermath raise some of the same questions with which we grapple in ongoing discussions about the Allies’ failure to attack Auschwitz.
Even as it disparaged the Israeli bombing raid, the New York Times acknowledged that Evin was “a singular symbol of oppression,” where Iran’s rulers “punish dissent with detention, interrogation, torture and execution.”
The lengthy Times article mentioned that the bombs hit “the infamous 209 ward controlled by intelligence forces,” but it failed to explain why that ward is infamous. For that,
Israeli made the morally right choice, even though Amnesty International says it was a ‘war crime.’
one must look elsewhere, such as Hengameh Haj Hassan’s gripping 2013 memoir, Face to Face with the Beast: Iranian Women in Mullah’s Prisons.
Hassan and five other women were confined in a Ward 209 cell so small “that there wasn’t room enough to stretch out” to sleep. Some were political dissidents. One was a 16 year-old girl jailed for possessing a romance novel. The prisoners’ clothes were filthy “because of torture and bleeding wounds.” They shared a single decrepit toothbrush. The food consisted of one barely-edible meal daily.
All the women in Hassan’s cell were beaten and tortured regularly. The officers who questioned Hassan boasted that they were “better at torturing and interrogating” than their colleagues. She endured unimaginable suffering, and also witnessed numerous “scenes of sexual humiliation,” including officers “raping girls before they executed them.”
The centerpiece of the New York Times story was the accusation that Israel’s bombing of Evin harmed some innocent bystanders. How many of them were killed or injured is impossible to know, because the Times relied partly on information from the Iranian government. The total number appears to be in the dozens, including some prisoners and relatives who were visiting them.
Kanal 13, an independent news outlet based in neighboring Azerbaijan, has broadcast video on YouTube that it said shows prisoners escaping from Evin as a result of the bombing. How many escaped may never be known.
When the Israeli government decided to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had no military reason to come to the aid of imprisoned
Iranian dissidents. Attacking Evin was strictly a humanitarian gesture.
Unfortunately, Israel has not yet invented bombs that only blow the locks off prison cells or kill only the guards. Meaning that hitting the prison could endanger the lives of some innocent bystanders. But it also could mean freedom, and life, for many others.
The Allies faced similar dilemmas during World War II, yet that never stopped them from bombing necessary targets.
In February 1944, British fighter-bombers attacked the Amiens prison in German-occupied France, where the Nazis were holding French resistance fighters. The planes struck
Aerial surveillance photo US pilots took over Auschwitz in 1944.
Courtesy David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
The IDF found Nazi-related paraphernalia in civilian homes in Southern Lebanon on Nov. 1, 2024. IDF
melanie phillips
British journalist
rafael medoff
Mount Sinai South Nassau is Improving Health Care on the South Shore
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To learn more visit www.mountsinai.org/feilpavilion
Why teachers’ unions are at war with Israel…
Continued from page 20
against efforts to counter Jew-hatred.
Just this week, the California Teachers Association opposed an effort to create a state office to combat antisemitism. Their reason left not much doubt about their motivation.
The association feared that any such state program would impair its ability to spread misinformation about Israel and indoctrinate students to treat the Jewish state as an illegitimate entity that is not only committing heinous war crimes against Palestinian Arabs, but has no right to exist. In essence, they oppose any definition of antisemitism that won’t give them a pass to commit it.
‘Hamas tunnels’
To those who have been fighting against the spread of Jew-hatred in the schools, this is nothing new. Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project, a legal defense organization that fights antisemitism across the United States by advising parents and teachers, in addition to taking school systems and colleges to court, says that a big part of the problem is the unions.
“What we’ve found in public K-12 schools is that the majority of the antisemitic materials used in the classrooms are shared and strongly encouraged by the leadership of the teachers’ unions,” says Marcus. “We refer to those unions
Sacks…
Continued from page 18
be done, and no one else to do it. Even then, were the zealot to ask permission from a court, he would be denied it.
Pinchas gave his name to the parsha in which Moses asks G-d to appoint a successor. Rabbi Menahem Mendel, the Rebbe of Kotzk, asked why Pinchas, hero of the hour, was not appointed instead of Joshua. His answer was that a zealot cannot be a leader. That requires patience, forbearance, and respect for due process.
The zealots within besieged Jerusalem in the last days of the Second Temple played a significant part in the city’s destruction. They were more intent on fighting one another than the Romans outside the city walls.
Nothing in the religious life is more riskladen than zeal, and nothing more compelling than the truth G-d taught Elijah, that G-d is not to be found in the use of force but in the still, small voice that turns the sinner from sin. As for vengeance, that belongs to G-d alone.
Berlin…
Continued from page 19
of spiritual triumph. And yet the fear alone was enough to take her life. We do this too. We stress over things that might happen. How often do I worry that a class won’t go well while I’m preparing a lecture? And maybe it is not the best class, but life moves on.
We lose sleep, peace of mind, and clarity over scenarios that often never come to pass. And if they do, were they really so life altering? Why suffer now over what might not be? If it happens, we will deal with it then.
That soldier told me he went back outside with his family and watched the fireworks again, trying to reassociate the sounds with something more pleasant than the trauma of his past. He had a moment of peace. He deserves that peace.
May we all be blessed with that kind of peace. A true bris shalom
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
as the Hamas tunnels; they are the delivery source through which the hate-inspiring materials are burrowed, largely undetected, to be used to poison the hearts and minds of students with Jew-hatred.”
This didn’t start on Oct. 7.
In California, a long-running debate about an ethnic-studies requirement in high school hinged on the way that the school curriculum was not just excluding Jews as a minority group worthy of being highlighted in any such program. Its teachings promoted an anti-Israel narrative in which Jewish history and rights are erased, and the Jewish state is delegitimized.
More than that, as Marcus notes, students and families have often been targeted, shunned and harassed because of their Jewish identity while teachers and administrators look the other way. In some cases, they tacitly encourage it because they see it as merely instances of people venting their understandable hatred for anything they associate with Israel or Judaism.
“We’ve seen the malign influence of the teachers’ unions repeatedly,” says Marcus. “The unions are behind it, whether it’s launching a ‘Teach-In for Palestine’ instead of regular academic classes in Oakland in December 2023, or instructing teachers to teach about the settler colonialism and oppression of Israel and to hide what they are teaching in Los Angeles, or simple Jew-hatred, pure and simple, by the Massachu-
setts Teachers Union which is occurring now.”
Some of this might be ascribed to the natural tendency of any union to stand by its teachers, no matter what they do. Still, when educators are accused of using their positions to promote antisemitism and anti-Zionism, they often declare that there’s nothing wrong with stating their own personal opinions about the issues of the day. As Marcus notes, the unions are telling teachers that they “are entitled to express their own political opinions in their classrooms. But every court in the country that has addressed that issue says that is not so.”
Engine of antisemitism
As a group, teachers deserve our respect and support. The unfortunate truth, though, is that as much as we rightly complain about what is being taught in elite schools today, a generation of Americans has already been influenced by woke doctrines. And they are now in place teaching not just at Harvard and Columbia, but in elementary, middle and high schools across the country.
That is especially true among those who are union activists. The NEA, the AFT and many state and local teachers’ associations have become the engine of the normalization of antisemitism in the schools. They are doing everything they can to resist the pushback that they are finally getting from those who are doing all
they can to turn back the antisemitic tide that has already swept over the education system. So, what can we do about it?
For one, efforts like those of the Deborah Project and other nonprofits that are waging this struggle one district at a time need more support. A destructive partisanship has prevented major liberal Jewish groups like the ADL and the American Jewish Committee from supporting the Trump administration’s campaign to defund institutions that tolerate antisemitism. But if successful, that effort could go a long way toward forcing the schools and academia to disavow leftist doctrines, lest they too be stripped of federal aid.
What is also necessary is for families and communities to rise up, and make it clear to the unions and the teachers that they won’t tolerate their extremism any longer. Those teachers who dissent from this woke plague also need to be supported as they wage a difficult fight to change the unions from within. Until they do, there should be an end to any illusions that teachers’ unions should be regarded with the same affection that their profession still holds in the minds of the public.
The NEA and AFT, and other similar organizations should be labeled for what they are: groups that are spreading hatred rather than knowledge.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Flatow… Weinreb… Goldman…
Continued from page 22 Continued from page 19 Continued from page 19
first. While we fully believe in miracles, we may not rely on them.
In Pirke Avot (2:6), Hillel taught, “The bashful cannot learn.” If we are too shy to ask a question, we will never find the answers we are looking for. Or, as a colleague once told me, “The only stupid question is the one that doesn’t get asked.” We need to take the initiative.
My son was once taught a valuable lesson by a master fundraiser in Cape Town, South Africa. He told my son, “Do you know why people don’t give tzedakah? Because nobody asks them!”
In dealing with synagogue committees throughout my rabbinic career, I discovered, to my detriment, that “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.” It wasn’t in my nature. I never enjoyed asking for myself, but sadly, such is the reality.
I sit on the board of a Jewish day school system in Johannesburg. We are currently looking to fill the position of principal in one of our schools. We’ve interviewed several candidates. One that we let go was because, in the words of one of our board members, “They didn’t want it enough.” We didn’t see any passion for the position. It’s an important quality in achieving success.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe took pleasure from children chanting, “We want Moshiach now!” The Rebbe wanted kids to sing it frequently, to cry out, to demand the coming of the messiah. He explained that in English, the word “want” isn’t only a desire or a craving, but a need.
Where there is a want, something is lacking. Wanting Moshiach means that we have a void in our lives without him. If we show G-d that we really do want Moshiach and we want him now, then hopefully He will respond.
G-d wanted to know that the women longed for a share in the Land of Israel. When the daughters of Tzelafchad demonstrated that they did, it was given to them immediately.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Ish, when such levels of piety and meticulous Torah observance are, to say the least, not the norm at all, but all sorts of deviant behaviors are tolerated and even advocated, the individual who does not conform cannot be punished so harshly. Such individuals are simply conforming to the norms of their environment and are swept away by powerful cultural influences, and have in effect been “brainwashed”. Extremist actions against those with whom we may disagree cannot be justified in such cultural contexts. Zealots cannot take rash measures against “sinners” in a society where sin is just an “alternative lifestyle”.
So much for constraints on extremism. Let me conclude with some of the statements made by Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, zt”l, about the deleterious effects that extremism has had upon the Jewish people during the entire course of our history. These statements are to be found in a very early book of Rav Kook’s, only recently finally published.
The work is entitled “L’Nevuchei HaDor (For the Perplexed of the Generation).” It is published by Yediot Acharonot and has stimulated much interest, discussion, and controversy. Here is his assertion, translated to the best of my ability:
The tendency toward extremism has caused pain to every beneficent sector — extremism in education and in actions, and also extremism in ideologies. We have reached a level of extremism that is sufficiently extreme to assert dogmas and policies which are clearly refutable from every perspective.
Writing well over 100 years ago, he is clearly referring to positions held then, and still not relinquished today, against the nationalist hopes and goals advocated by the Zionist movements. He insists that nationalism and patriotism are not at all inconsistent with our religious values and tradition, that we are a nation and not just a religion.
As in all of Rav Kook’s writings, there are sparks of prophecy that one can recognize and should at least contemplate, consider, and debate. One thing is for sure; extremism is not always beneficial. It must be tempered, controlled, and redirected toward cooperation and mutual understanding. We all must share in the Almighty’s gift to Pinchas — His covenant of shalom! Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
soldiers. Entire combat divisions were reconstituted in days. Secular and religious Jews, left-wing and right-wing parties, urban Tel Avivians and residents of Judea and Samaria — everyone knew the war was just.
That unity translated into operational effectiveness. The IDF rebounded from initial failures and began to take the fight to Hamas. Families opened their homes to evacuees. Civil society mobilized on a scale not seen since the Yom Kippur War.
But as the war dragged on, cracks began to reappear — not in military resolve but in national consensus about how to end the conflict.
At the heart of the debate: the hostages. With more than 100 Israeli civilians and soldiers still held in Gaza, weekly protests grew across Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The demand was simple: “Bring Them Home Now.”
What began as a unifying moral cry slowly exposed deeper tensions. Some believed that Israel should halt the war, agree to a long ceasefire and release Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the hostages. Others warned that doing so would only embolden Hamas and prolong the conflict, making future attacks more likely.
For the first time since Oct. 7, the hostage issue reopened old divisions — between left and right, between political leadership and grieving families, between the military imperative to destroy Hamas and the Jewish imperative to redeem captives at all costs.
The debate did not break national unity, but it tested it. It revealed the difficulty of waging war in a democracy that values every human life and the complexity of making peace when the enemy hides behind civilians.
Then, in 2025, Israel faced another test of national unity: Iran. With Iranian enrichment reaching weapons-grade levels and international diplomacy stalled, Israel launched a multi-pronged, preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear sites.
This operation, long anticipated and even longer debated, succeeded not only because
Continued from previous page of Israeli military innovation — but because the public once again backed it. Despite political polarization in other areas, Israelis knew what was at stake. The existential threat of a nuclear Iran was a rare point of agreement.
The strike degraded Iran’s program significantly. Hezbollah and other proxies retaliated with rocket fire, but Israel’s air-defense systems — bolstered by national preparedness — held. The war cabinet functioned, the IDF performed, and the nation stood together.
Even Arab citizens, who had felt alienated during past conflicts, remained largely calm. There were no widespread riots, no domestic chaos. That, too, was a form of victory.
From 1948 to 2025, Israel’s greatest victories have never been purely military. They were made possible because the people believed in the mission. When the mission was unclear or the nation divided, even tactical success became strategic failure. When the people stood united, Israel prevailed.
The aftermath of Oct. 7 showed that unity can return even after bitter division. But sustaining it, especially as war continues, hostages remain in captivity and challenging decisions await, is Israel’s most important challenge.
If Israel is to emerge from the Gaza war not only victorious but strengthened, then the nation must pull together again. Accusations that the war is being prolonged for political gain — however passionately held — undermine the shared resolve needed to win. The enemy watches not only Israel’s firepower but its internal fractures. Unity is not blind agreement; it is the recognition that defeating Hamas, returning the hostages and securing Israel’s future all require a national effort grounded in mutual responsibility and trust.
If Israelis can re-embrace that unity, then perhaps this war — born of unimaginable loss — can also mark the beginning of national restoration.
Stephen Flatow is an attorney, president of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi, and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Ballabon…
Continued from page 22
as colonial usurpers. And a barbaric genocidal death cult that openly glorifies mass murder, violent rape, and beheadings is canonized as the victim.
And so, in the aftermath of the most barbaric and savage attack on Jews since the Holocaust, ghoulishly and gleefully broadcast by the “Palestinians” on social media, Jewish students are terrorized on college campuses. Synagogues are vandalized. Kosher restaurants are smashed. Mobs around the world chant “Free Palestine,” Globalize the Intifada,” “From the River to the Sea,” and “Death to Jews” all while insisting it is the Jews who are committing the genocide.
This the most ancient hatred in new packaging. A blood libel wrapped in hashtags. A pseudo-theological antisemitism for a postreligious world.
The “Jesus was a Palestinian” lie is not about Jesus at all. It is about justifying Jewish blood in the streets. It is absolution for antisemitism, an authorization for violence, and a call to erase not just the Jews’ past, but our future.
For centuries, Jews were murdered in the name of the religion of love; now Jews are scapegoated and crucified in the name of human rights. No, Jesus was not “Palestinian,” but every “Palestinian” is now Jesus.
Jeff Ballabon is an American media executive, lobbyist, political adviser and consultant. Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Phillips…
Continued from page 24
widespread in the Islamic world, it was given rocket fuel after the war by the massive conversion of former Nazis to Islam and the flight of various high-ranking Nazis to Arab countries, particularly Syria and Egypt.
These former Nazi officers trained the Arabs to become terrorists and also put into widespread practice the strategy of the Nazis’ propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, who reportedly said: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
Palestinian terrorist armies, as well as their fellow-travelers on the streets of Western cities, have been repeatedly seen giving the Nazi salute. Yet while the West ignores or dismisses the Nazi roots of the Palestinian agenda to exterminate Israel, in an Orwellian inversion it accuses Israel itself of Nazi-style crimes.
It accuses it of committing genocide against the Palestinian Arabs and claims that there are concentration camps in Gaza. In Britain, Adnan Hussein, an independent “pro-Palestine” member of parliament, suggested this week that Israel might be planning “gas chambers” for Gazans.
Many of the young people who parrot these obscenities in such huge numbers are so profoundly ignorant and with so little capacity to think that they have no idea what they are saying. Throughout the West, Hitler and the Nazis have long been reduced to allpurpose cartoon villains.
At a deeper level, however, falsely accusing Israel and the Jews of committing the monstrous crimes of which they have been the victims taps into far darker cultural currents. For some, painting Jews as Nazis is a way of cleansing themselves of the unbearable stain of cultural complicity in the Holocaust.
If the Jews are committing genocide, goes this thinking, the Nazi genocide of the Jews was obviously not such a big deal. And so the rest of the West — whose policies of appeasement enabled the Holocaust to happen, which shut its doors against the victims and whose own culture gave rise to that horror in the first place — is off the hook.
With the Palestinian cause having become the default position of the liberal mind, millions in the West are parroting its propaganda. And alongside the Nazi-derived tropes of Jewish demonization, Palestinian Arabs themselves repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide and other Nazi behavior.
This is clearly a tactic to deflect any scrutiny of their own Nazi links. It also derives from the Muslim belief that everything in the Islamic world is good while everything in the non-Islamic world is bad, which results in the routineMuslim inversion of victim and victimizer, justice and injustice, truth and lies.
This inversion draws in turn upon the Palestinian Arabs’ appropriation for themselves of all the perceived advantages of the Jews’ historic identity, including the supreme victimization of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, which the Palestinians leverage by claiming that victim status for themselves at the hands of the Jews.
The current frenzy over Israel and the Jews doesn’t just have baleful historic echoes. It can justifiably be seen as the last remaining and hitherto unrecognized front of the Second World War.
The heirs to the Nazi-Arab alliance for the extermination of the Jews are marching shoulder to shoulder alongside the so-called progressives of the Western left. This poses a deadly threat to the Jews of the Diaspora and to the West itself.
Alas, the country that led the fight to defeat the Nazis has now capitulated to their heirs. In London this week, French President
Emmanuel Macron told the British parliament that an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip “without any conditions” was vital to end the “dehumanization” of the Gazans and that recognizing a State of Palestine was “the only path to peace.”
Such moves would empower Hamas and leave their Israeli victims at the mercy of the Palestinian agenda of extermination, ripping up international law to do so. At this sickening abandonment of civilization for barbarism, Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, enthusiastically applauded.
Not only have these two leaders refused to call out in terms the murderous lunacy that’s gripped the West, but they are fueling it. Winston Churchill must be turning over in his grave.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
Medoff…
Continued from page 24
such narrow targets as a guardhouse and specific walls. As a result, 258 prisoners escaped. But 102 were killed.
The New York Times article about the Amiens raid did not contain even a hint of criticism. Nor did other media coverage of the bombing. An official of the World Jewish Congress clipped out the Times article and sent it to US Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, with a note describing the raid as “exactly the kind of assault which we have been asking for in order to free the doomed inmates of the German slaughter camps.”
Roosevelt administration officials rejected such requests from dozens of officials of Jewish organizations.
Assaults such as the one on Amiens were known as “precision bombing,” but of course there was a limit to how precise they could
be. As in all wars, bystanders sometimes were harmed.
In April 1944, for example, the British targeted an archive in The Hague where the Germans stored documents that were potentially harmful to the Dutch resistance. The bombers destroyed the building and an adjacent SS barracks, but 64 archivists and passersby were killed. That August, American planes bombed a rocket factory inside the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. They demolished the factory and killed about 100 SS officers and their family members, but an estimated 388 slave laborers in the factory were killed and more than 1,000 were wounded.
Two months later, the British bombed Gestapo headquarters in northeastern Denmark. They destroyed crucial files and killed dozens of Germans. Two prisoners from the Danish resistance escaped; but a third was killed in the bombing. Stray bombs hit an adjacent building, killing ten civilians. Five months after that, the British bombed Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, leveling the building and enabling eighteen Danish prisoners to flee, but some bombs accidentally hit a nearby school, killing about 125 civilians.
American planes repeatedly bombed the synthetic oil factories in the industrial zone of Auschwitz, even though the Allies knew that about 600 British POWs were being held there. Thirty-eight of them were killed when the US bombed those factories on August 20, 1944.
The choice for Israel was to do what the international community has always done about Iranian oppression — nothing — or to take action to interrupt the mass torture, even at the risk of harming some bystanders.
The Israelis made the morally right choice, even though Amnesty International says it was a “war crime.” The Israelis accomplished in minutes more than all of Amnesty’s crocodile tears press releases about Evin ever did.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
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