Free Republic

(Originally posted to the author’s website, Abu Yehuda} As many of you know, I returned to live in Israel a year ago after 26 years in the place I consider my beloved hometown, Fresno California, located in the large valley that runs down the center of the state. It is more or less equidistant from Los Angeles and San Francisco; politically it is on a different planet. Its establishment is solidly socially and politically conservative, although Democrats have a slight edge in voter registration. The main industries are agriculture and related occupations, and there is a branch of the California...

American Jewry is being tested today as never before. The future of the community is tied up in the results of the test. If the Jews of America are able to mount a successful, forceful and sustained opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which allows the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism to become a nuclear-armed state and provides it with $150 billion up front, then the community will survive politically to fight another day. If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised. On the face of it,...

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Sen. Al Franken endorsed the Iran nuclear deal, becoming the fifth of nine Jewish senators to back the agreement. “Many have expressed reservations about the deal, and I share some of those reservations,” Franken, D-Minn., wrote in an Op-Ed on CNN’s website. “It isn’t a perfect agreement,” he said. “But it is a strong one. This agreement is, in my opinion, the most effective, realistic way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon anytime in the next 15 years.”

It was his birthday and Obama was grouchy. “It’s my birthday and I’m going to be blunt,” Obama told the Jewish leaders meeting with him. When they complained that, “Words have consequences, and when they come from official sources, they can be even more dangerous,” he was unapologetic. “If you guys would back down, I would back down from some of the things I’m doing,” he warned. By that he meant that if they stopped objecting to the Iran deal, he would stop accusing critics of his nuclear sellout to Iran of being money-grubbing warmongers. Obama complained, “It's been a...

It was his birthday and Obama was grouchy. “It’s my birthday and I’m going to be blunt,” Obama told the Jewish leaders meeting with him. When they complained that, “Words have consequences, and when they come from official sources, they can be even more dangerous,” he was unapologetic.

Secretary of State John Kerry bewailed Sen. Charles Schumer's (D-NY) announcement of his opposition to the Iran deal as "profoundly misguided." "I understand that Senator Schumer needs Jewish votes," Kerry observed. "What he doesn't understand is that his Jewish constituents are not the Jews Iran intends to wipe off the map. Iran has made it clear to me that it is targeting Zionists in Israel for extermination. Jews who are willing to leave Israel and Jews who live in New York are not their targets." Kerry admitted that he "didn't totally disregard the possibility that some of the funds granted...

American Jews now oppose the Iran deal by a margin of two-to-one, according to a new poll–with those between 18 and 30 against the deal four-to-one. The telephone poll of 1,035 registered voters, conducted by McKeon & Associates July 29 and 30, found that a large plurality of registered Jewish voters oppose the deal, 45% to 22%.

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” —Winston Churchill A Time for TruthSenator Ted Cruz, having been introduced by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, greeted the Persian Jews of Nessah Synagogue in Beverly Hills, on Saturday, August 1, 2015. “You know, this week’s Torah reading covered the Ten Commandments,” Cruz opened, “a topic rarely discussed, or followed, in Washington, DC.” The crowd laughed, and Cruz continued: “Among them is the fairly simple and straightforward proposition: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ That, in particular, is an admonition from God...

A walk around the streets of Jerusalem can be an eye-opening experience. Jews come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. After 2,000 years of Diaspora, Jews are returning from literally every corner of the globe, bringing with them a genetic, historical, and cultural diversity that is unparalleled by any other nation, except perhaps the United States. The ingathering of the exiles is yet another part of the process of redemption, as promised in Deuteronomy, and in many places in the Prophets (Jeremiah 29:14; Ezekiel 11:17; Isaiah 56:8; Psalms 106:47). Immigration to Israel is called aliyah, literally translated as “rising up”....

If Iran does take steps in the future to annihilate Israel, the leftist Jews who are criticizing Huckabee will never see it coming. And that, Mr. Obama is “sad.” As much as can be generalized, Jews have traditionally been liberal. This can be explained by the fact that Jews have been persecuted throughout history and they tend to identify with people and groups that are or appear to be marginalized. With the rise of the new anti-Semitism on the left under the guise of being anti-Israel but holding Israel to a different standard than other countries with serious human rights...

Not having a theology degree, nor even a Ph.D., and being, too, a bit naïve regarding matters of high-brow philosophical currents throughout the ages, I have to admit that when I first read Karl Marx' essay, The Jewish Question, I was actually stunned by its contents. First off, my rather cursory education in various philosophies and in Marxism, particularly, did not prepare me for the bitter thrust of old Karl's potent anti-Semitism. In fact, until reading this particular essay, I would have never, in a million years, connected much of anything whatsoever Marxian with Jew hate. Who would? After all,...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's comments that President Barack Obama is marching Israelis to "the door of the oven," sparked an immediate rebuke from Jewish groups and the President himself, but Donald Trump's special counsel Michael Cohen said he doesn't think that Trump finds those words offensive. "I don't think so," Cohen, executive president of the Trump organization, told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day" on Monday. "I think what [Huckabee is] really trying to say is we're in a bad place," adding that he has personally lost family members in the Holocaust and does not want to see...

How in touch is Senator Schumer with his constituents? Two days ago a number of Jewish protesters, most of them elderly, were arrested while protesting the nuclear deal with Iran and calling on Schumer to do the right thing. And Schumer ignored them. Instead his Twitter account showed him smirking side by side with champion smirker and opponent of Israel, Jon Stewart.   .@ComedyCentral will miss Jon; thanks for letting me crash tonight. @TheDailyShow #DailyShow pic.twitter.com/FmNWJo54vc — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) July 24, 2015 The contrast is unfortunately quite striking.   While his constituents were going to jail to protest...

This weekend, I shed tears over the Iran deal–literally, and publicly. It happened during a discussion among congregants at my synagogue about President Barack Obama’s capitulation to the Iranian regime. That is how the deal is viewed in my Orthodox shul–universally. No one has any delusions about what the deal means for the United States and Israel.

The ship Exodus 1947 became a symbol of Aliya Bet — illegal immigration. After World War II, illegal immigration increased and the British authorities decided to stop it by sending the ships back to the ports of embarkation in Europe. The first ship to which this policy was applied was the Exodus 1947. The ship sailed from the port of Site, near Marseilles, on July 11, 1947, with 4,515 immigrants, including 655 children, on board. As soon as it left the territorial waters of France, British destroyers accompanied it. On July 18, near the coast of Palestine but outside territorial...

Reading Michael Oren’s chart-topping new bestseller Ally [1], I saw how fitting it was that he was appointed to one of Israel’s top diplomat chairs: from 2009 to 2013, Oren was ambassador to the United States.Oren is a diplomat through and through. He listens to both sides, hopes to bridge and reconcile. The central dynamic and drama of Ally – by now, of course, already much discussed and bitterly debated — is his effort to mediate between the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration, while, based on the events that unfolded, feeling compelled to indict the latter as harmful...

‘Bottleneck’ dates back 600 to 800 years, genome analysis shows; researcher says among population ‘everyone is a 30th cousin. Illustrative photo of Ashkenazi Jews, taken from Nurit Ben Sheetri's 'The Redheads' exhibit at Dizengoff Center (courtesy Nurit Ben Sheetrit) A new study concludes that all Ashkenazi Jews can trace their ancestry to a “bottleneck” of just 350 individuals, dating back to between 600 and 800 years ago. The study, published in the Nature Communications journal Tuesday, was authored by Shai Carmi, a computer science professor at Columbia University, and more than 20 medical researchers from Yale, Columbia, Yeshiva University’s Albert...

Hillary Clinton is privately signaling to wealthy Jewish donors that — no matter the result of the Iranian nuclear negotiations — she will be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama. But, even as donors increasingly push Clinton on the subject in private, they have emerged with sometimes widely varying interpretations about whether she would support a prospective deal, according to interviews with more than 10 influential donors and fundraising operatives. Clinton’s private responses in some ways resemble a foreign policy Rorschach test; donors who see a deal as important to world peace have come away thinking that...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — The world’s Jewish population has almost rebounded to pre-Holocaust numbers, according to a new report.

WASHINGTON (JTA) – From the man who married her grandmother to the man who married her daughter, from working a room full of bar mitzvah guests on behalf of her husband’s political career to headlining major pro-Israel events during her own, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s journey has never wandered far from Jews. Clinton’s Jewish encounters have been a natural consequence of her East Coast education, her trajectory in the party favored by a substantial majority of Jewish-Americans, and her embrace of the Jewish narrative of triumphing over adversity and bigotry, longtime friends of the 2016 presidential candidate say. Sara Ehrman, whose...