Free Republic

“We can’t put down the phone without picking up the next one,” said a rabbi in Los Angeles who runs a nonprofit that offers firearm training to the Jewish community.Henya Chein has always been terrified of guns. The Orthodox Jewish artist and mother of two felt uneasy about her husband’s decision to buy a handgun after they moved to Florida from New York last year.“I would just block it out of my mind that it’s in the house,” Chein, 26, said.But after watching the events unfold in Israel, she’s taken steps she never imagined herself ever taking. Chein attended a...

Jon Rettinger has not let his children wear their yarmulkes in public this week, afraid they could be targeted for being Jewish. The father of three in Orange County, California, said he has tried to keep his children, ages 10, seven and four, from watching or reading news, but they are still coming home from school with questions about the conflict in Israel and Gaza. One of them has asked if they were going to be kidnapped, Rettinger said. “It’s horrible for any family to have to explain to children that people hate them because of who they are,” Rettinger...

Joel Simonds, a Los Angeles-based rabbi involved in progressive causes, has always known that many of his ideological allies did not agree with him on Israel. But after this weekend’s terror attack, the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust, Simonds said many liberal Jews feel abandoned by people they thought were friends, some of whom have expressed little sympathy for the Israelis killed while focusing instead on the plight of Palestinians. “In these last few days, the silence is deafening and it is hurtful and a betrayal on so many levels,” said Simonds, the founding director of the Jewish...

"Former US president Donald Trump said that many American Jews don’t love Israel, otherwise, they would have voted for him and charged that Israel used to have “absolute power over Congress.” Trump’s comments from an interview with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid in July were broadcast Thursday on the Unholy Podcast, hosted by Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 12 news and Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian." "“There are people in this country that are Jewish, no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than Jews in this country,” Trump said."

ADMIRER OF HAJ AMIN AL-HUSSEINI MUFTI OF "PALESTINE": SUFI ABDUL HAMID - BLACK HITLER'S WAR AGAINST ITALIANS AND JEWS IN THE 1930'S HARLEM, NEW YORK BLACK HITLER' JAILED TO AWAIT SENTENCE; Gorgeous Array of Sufi Abdul Hamid Avails Nought -- Found Guilty in Pamphlet Sale.January 16, 1935, Page 7... arrayed, dusky- skinned man stood before Magistrade Thomas Aurelio yesterday in Harlem Court. His name, he said, was Sufi Abdul Hamid. A year ago he was acquitted in the same court when the police accused him of urging his Negro followers to drive the Jews and Italians out of Harlem....

A poll by the nonpartisan Jewish Electoral Institute (JEI) in late February, when it still seemed that Bernie Sanders was the Democratic frontrunner, found that Sanders “would overwhelmingly outperform US President Donald Trump with Jewish voters in a head-to-head match-up this fall”—to the tune of 65% to 30%. This was despite the fact of “only 52% of American Jews having a favorable view of Sanders and 45% having an unfavorable view of him.” Presumably, that relatively low approval rate reflected—at least in part—the fact that Sanders had called Israel’s government racist, called for cutting aid to Israel, and “surrounded himself...

(December 15, 2019 / JNS) The past week clarified a lot of things about the state of the American Jewish community—and its antagonists. The two assailants who walked into the kosher supermarket in Jersey City on Tuesday and opened fire intentionally targeted Jews. The killers belonged to the black supremacist, virulently anti-Semitic “Black Hebrew Israelite” movement which claims its members are the true children of Israel and the Jews are satanic imposters. The shooting in Jersey City marked a predictable escalation of the anti-Semitic attacks being carried out against Orthodox Jews in the New York area. The focal points of...

Trump: Personification of the traditional pro-business, pro-Israel America that has allowed Jews to flourish for more than 200 years. Look at France, Germany just two places in Europe unsafe for Jews, both riddled with Leftism and anti-Semitism With fewer than 450 days to the 2020 election, it’s no longer too early to assert why American Jews ought to vote to re-elect the president: Trump is good for America and America is good for the Jews. As the Trump re-election campaign debuts its “coalitions” outreach effort, the question inevitably arises whether American Jews will in significant numbers switch from their traditional...

The American Jewish Committee responded in a tweet that: “Accusing Jews of dual loyalty is one of the oldest and most pernicious antisemitic tropes." Activist Linda Sarsour appeared to criticize American Jews of a dual loyalty to Israel in a Facebook post calling for support for Congresswoman-elect Ilhan Omar, following a backlash over her announcement that she supports boycotting Israel. Sarsour wrote in the post on Thursday that Omar is “being attacked for saying that she supports BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) and the right for people to engage in constitutionally protected freedoms. This is not only coming from the right-wing...

Apart from the United States, if there's one country where it's not only okay to condemn, but also the politically correct thing to do, it's Israel. That little sliver of land located on the western side of the Fertile Crescent receives its fair share of hate as well as its neighbors' shares of hate, too. Even being associated with Israel earns hate — ask Lana Del Rey. So why is it that Israel has become so skeptical of American Jews? Shouldn't the two groups be allies? Well, yes, they should be. Unfortunately for Israel, many American Jews side with the...

791 (at least count) American rabbis - more than double the number who signed a petition in favor - have signed a petition against President Obama's sellout to a nuclear-armed Iran. PLEASE SIGN ONLY IF YOU ARE AN ORDAINED RABBI —THANK YOU!We, the undersigned rabbis, write as a unified voice across religious denominations to express our concerns with the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran.For more than 20 months, our communities have kept keen eyes on the nuclear negotiations overseas. As our diplomats from Washington worked tirelessly to reach a peaceful resolution to the Iranian nuclear challenge—we have hoped, and...

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,...

This week in two meetings with prominent American Jews, President Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet. Either the Jews of America will rise to the challenge or they will allow Obama to marginalize them. It is their choice, and now is the time for them to decide. In the first meeting, Obama met with centrist Jewish leaders from major Jewish organizations like the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC. Major donors to these groups, like to almost every other major Jewish organization in America, are largely Democrats. According to The Washington Post, the purpose...

ews in the United States are overwhelmingly proud to be Jewish, yet nearly one in five of them describe themselves as having no religion, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Tuesday. The gap is generational, with 32 percent of Jews born after 1980 identifying as Jewish on the basis of ancestry, ethnicity or culture – compared with 93 percent of Jews born in 1914-27 who identified on the basis of their faith. "This shift in Jewish self-identification reflects broader changes in the US public," said Pew's Religion and Public Life Project in a summary of its 210-page report....

The survey, conducted among 1,004 American Jews by the Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute, found that Obama has the same level of support, 62 percent, among American Jewish voters as during a comparable point in the 2008 race. Obama administration is blaming Israel for the recent rise in global crude oil prices. The rise in fuel prices is deemed as harming the U.S. economy and has also hurt Obama in the polls Of Jews who supported Obama in 2008, an overwhelming majority, 86 percent, say they would like to see him re-elected

Upon his return to Ramallah from New York, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was greeted by a crowd of several thousand well-wishers. They applauded him for his speech at the UN. There, Abbas erased Jewish history from the Land of Israel, denied Israel’s right to exist and pledged his commitment to establish a racist Palestinian state ethnically cleansed of all Jews. Many of Abbas’s supporters in Ramallah held posters of US President Barack Obama. On them Obama was portrayed as a monkey. The caption read, “The First Jewish President of the United States.” The fact that the Palestinians from Fatah...

This political survey was intended to provide a snapshot of Jewish voters. It offers some interesting insights into the depth and intensity of Jewish political engagement, but by the nature of this study it does not permit one to make any defining conclusions. Further, the findings confirm that from this particular cohort (some 2300 participants), Jews hold deeply embedded policy positions on key domestic and international issues. In this particular study one finds a distinctive Jewish conservative voice emerging on Israel related matters and an array of domestic social issues. [Bold added for emphasis by poster.] The data also suggests...

An overwhelming majority of American Jews believe that the goal of the Arabs "is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel," according to a recent poll released by the American Jewish Committee. Approximately 76% of respondents in the AJC's fall 2010 Survey of American Jewish Opinion agreed with a question to that effect, while only 20% disagreed. Meanwhile, 95% of the American Jews think Palestinians should be required to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in any future peace settlement.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned that senior Obama administration officials have been telling foreign governments that the administration intends to support an effort next week at the United Nations to set up an independent commission, under UN auspices, to investigate Israel's behavior in the Gaza flotilla incident. The White House has apparently shrugged off concerns from elsewhere in the U.S. government that a) this is an extraordinary singling out of Israel, since all kinds of much worse incidents happen around the world without spurring UN investigations; b) that the investigation will be one-sided, focusing entirely on Israeli behavior and not...

What the scribe conveniently Left out --- and yet why the questions he raises matter Peter Beinart's "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" in last week's New York Review of Books is an important piece — important in the same way as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's 2006 screed "The Israeli Lobby:" It will be widely quoted and pernicious in effect. Beinart begins with the results of focus groups conducted by pollster Frank Luntz with Jewish college students in 2003. In their discussions of Jewish identity, the subject of Israel never arose spontaneously, and when forced upon them, the...