Free Republic

The numbers are in: Israel is a happy place. Despite constantly facing vicious enemies and enduring a year and a half of sustained fighting and funerals, Israel ranks in the top 10 countries with the highest levels of happiness, according to the newly released 2025 World Happiness Report. At No. 8, Israel contrasts sharply with other war-torn countries that are quite reasonably miserable: Ukraine sits at 111, and Lebanon, which opened a second front against Israel in October 2023, is third from the bottom, at 145. Even advanced Western nations such as Great Britain and the United States, in 23rd...

Cognitive dissonance is when a person grapples with unreconcilable ideas. Sometimes, it forces reality on the person; sometimes, they get more delusional. One of the virtues of being a mentally healthy person in an honest society is that you don’t have to deal with cognitive dissonance. That is, there are no moments when you are forced to accept two entirely conflicting facts or values. Instead, you have the mental freedom to work through the conflict and come out with an honest evaluation. When people lack that honesty and liberty, the only refuge is delusions and heartfelt lies to themselves. That...

In the furor over America’s campuses, it was easy to miss the letter that 500 of Columbia University’s Jews penned and signed to present their position in their own voice. Yet it was this letter, quietly distributed and far less aggressive than some of the other events that overshadowed it, that may prove to be the turning point in the struggle for American Jewry’s future. This is why. Twenty years ago, just after the second intifada, I went on a tour of American and Canadian campuses. Shaken by what I saw and heard, I told (then) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon...

Natan Sharansky arrives at lunch precisely on time, his trademark olive-green cap perched firmly atop his head, complemented by a matching sweater. He exudes a lively energy – even after all he has been through – at age 76. “I went straight from hell to paradise, and I am still in paradise,” he says of his transition from nine years in a Soviet prison, including 405 days in a punishing cell, to Jerusalem. That time was partly served in a gulag-like “corrective colony,” and included hunger strikes and force-feeding. Indeed, it’s surreal to be sitting down with him in the...

Natan Sharansky, one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, corresponded with Alexei Navalny, one of the great heroes of the twenty-first. Navalny, through his lawyers, managed to get a Russian copy of Sharansky’s famous memoir Fear No Evil. He read it in the gulag where he was killed on February 16, 2024. We know this because he sent Sharansky two letters: one in March and one in April of 2023. Today we are honored to publish these historic letters in their original, handwritten Russian and in English. (We are grateful to Anna Lyubarskaja and Rebekah Koffler for their...

Twenty years ago, after my first trip as a government minister to 13 college campuses in the United States, I told Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s prime minister, that in my opinion, the main battlefield for the future of the Jewish people lies in American academia. Since then, I appeared dozens of times at different universities, and with each visit I witnessed the new antisemitism growing stronger. In light of this experience, I insisted in many conversations with liberal American Jews that while left- and right-wing antisemitism are connected and both are very dangerous, it is the left-wing variety that poses...

Just as Anti-Vaxxers are not “Refuseniks,” Palestinians are not experiencing either “apartheid” or “genocide.” Recently, heroic human rights activist Natan Sharansky, who spent over nine years in Soviet prisons as part of his very personal and also very public fight for Jewish freedom in the Soviet Union, commented on how the use of the term “Refusenik” to describe people who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19 “cheapens” the term. Sharansky (who coined the “3-D” test for determining when criticism of Israel is actually antisemitic”) described how the term “Refusenik” came to be: “Half a century ago, a modest Russian language...

Thankfully, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein’s opportunity to use his platform as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to spew his anti-Semitic venom against the Jewish state of Israel is coming to an end Natan Sharansky has written about what he called the “new anti-Semitism,” which “is aimed at the Jewish state.” He described his ‘3D’ test “to help us distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism.” The 3D’s stand for “demonization,” “double standards,” and “delegitimization.”

Mark Levin May 25 at 11:08am · My wife Julie and I with Natan Sharansky

Flashback: First FISA Request on Trump Tower Came After Clinton and AG Lynch Met Privately on Tarmac Was it coincidence or an indication of things to come? The pieces to Obamagate are falling together. On June 27th of 2016, Bill Clinton met secretly with Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. A week later FBI Director James Comey laid out in a press conference the many scandalous activities taken by Hillary Clinton while she was President Obama’s Secretary of State and then he said the famous words: "Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would...

It’s hard to tell parody from real life on certain college campuses these days, but I’m pretty sure this article is serious. The article, from the Brown Daily Herald, discusses how Brown students’ emotional and academic well-being is suffering because they are so busy fulfilling their “social justice responsibilities” as student activists. (And here I thought that if my parents were paying $60K a year for me to go to school, my first responsibility would be to study!) What I found especially of interest is that both this and a previous story in the Herald suggest that one incident that...

Ron Dermer Appointed As Israel's Next US AmbassadorBy Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem, Israel --- July 9, 2013 …Part of the following was communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser to the Israel News Agency. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed Ron Dermer as Israel's next Ambassador to the US. Over the past four years, Dermer has served as Prime Minister Netanyahu's senior adviser and previously (2005-2008) served as the economic attache' at the Israel Embassy in Washington. Dermer is 42, married and the father of five children. Ron is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School...

In the aftermath of the killing of a man at a Copenhagen synagogue by a member of the Religion of Peace, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “This wave of attacks is expected to continue. Jews deserve security in every country, but we say to our Jewish brothers and sisters, Israel is your home.” Russian emigre Natan Sharansky echoed Netanyahu’s call, stating, “There is no future for Jews in western Europe.” In response, European leaders shouted down Netanyahu. “We know there are doubts, questions across the community,” said French President Francois Hollande, who was elected with in excess of 93...

The West should listen to the dissidents in Iran craving freedom -- they can feel the future. Once again, the world is amazed. As with the seemingly sudden appearance of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, or the gaudy, grand-scale collapse of the Soviet empire at the end of that decade, the massive revolt of Iranian citizens has elicited the unmitigated surprise of the free world's army of experts, pundits and commentators. Who would have known? Who could have predicted this eruption of protest in a system so highly repressed, where a generally quiescent populace lives under such...

Identity Necessary for Survival by: Melinda Zosh, June 09, 2008 Americans are fighting the war on terror with technology and weapons, but one man says Americans are lacking the strongest, most effective weapon—identity. Natan Sharansky, author of Defending Identity and the New York Times best-seller The Case for Democracy, spoke about the importance of attaining a sense of identity in a democratic society at the Heritage Foundation on June 3. “Identity, a life of commitment, is essential because it satisfies a human longing to become part of something bigger than oneself,” Sharanksy wrote in his book Defending Identity. Sharansky, a...

Some three and a half years ago, former Prisoner of Zion and Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky was George W. Bush's favorite author. Sharansky earned an unexpected boost when the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. invited him and co-author Ron Dermer to the White House and told the world that everyone should read their book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror. While this was not the equivalent of an invitation to Oprah Winfrey's guest couch, Sharansky's tome did make it onto The New York Times bestseller list. After the easy overthrow of Saddam...

In my nine years in Israeli governments, I served as a minister in several different offices. In each case, the coalition negotiations needed to obtain each position were arduous, at times even exhausting. There was only one position that I received as a freebie, for it was uncontested: the role of chairman of the Interministerial Committee on Diaspora Affairs. Indeed, why should there be a struggle over a position with no budget, no appointments, and no political influence or importance? True, the committee deals with an important subject - dialogue and coordination of efforts with Diaspora Jewry. But whom does...

One of the high points at which the drama could have turned into a farce within seconds occurred nine years ago at the Wye Plantation summit. After exhausting and debilitating efforts, we received from Yasser Arafat a promise (even if half-hearted and unwilling) to delete from the Palestinian Charter the sections calling for the destruction of Israel. Upon leaving the conference room, we saw one of the closest advisers of President Bill Clinton and proudly told him about our achievement. "Are you out of your minds?" he shouted. "He's going to be killed because of that. He is too weak...

Former minister Natan Sharansky, whose book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror has inspired US President George W. Bush, gives Bush a "C" grade for implementing his vision. Sharansky, the former Prisoner of Zion who currently chairs the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, told The Jerusalem Post Thursday: "I have to give Bush credit, because he brought back the agenda of linking security and democracy, which was abandoned by the free world after the defeat of the Soviet Union. [But] what makes it hard for him to...

Just over three years ago, at the first-ever global forum on anti-Semitism organized by the State of Israel, the essential task was to define the beast - the new anti-Semitism. Since then, as the fourth such global gathering meets this week, efforts to incorporate the "three-D" distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel and the new anti-Semitism - demonization, double standards and delegitimization - have become part of international documents and discourse. These and other accomplishments, as important as they are, have been dwarfed by the quantum leap anti-Semitism itself has taken. It has leapfrogged from isolated attacks against Jews to...