Published in The National Interest On April 19, three days before this year’s start of Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating the Israelites’ exodus from bondage in ancient Egypt, six protestors were arrested at the Boston office of AIPAC, “America’s pro-Israel lobby.” They had chained themselves to a mock Seder table. Their group, IfNotNow, claims to “seek…
Category: Liberalism
The Left’s PC Hypocrisy on Islam [NATIONAL INTEREST] Muslims can speak for themselves.
Published on The National Interest Partisans of the Left compulsively claim President George W. Bush was an imbecile who couldn’t be trusted on anything. If they’re right, all of us must reflexively and wholly refute every statement he ever made. It would seem very reasonable, then, to first dispense with a sweeping pronouncement on one of…
Review: “Exit Right,” by Daniel Oppenheimer [AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE] Many eminent intellectuals became conservative by rejecting the utopian schemes of leftist radicalism.
Published in The American Conservative Throughout the Cold War, conservatives had a certain advantage in the competition of ideas—the battle between the West’s right to pursue happiness and the East’s pursuit of the right to happiness. The USSR—not to mention its despotic affiliates across the globe—was more than a temporal nightmare; it was the actualization of…
How to Revive Jewish Support for Israel [FEDERALIST] Current pro-Israel efforts among Jewish millennials will fail because they're targeting the symptom rather than the syndrome.
Published on The Federalist “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” That longstanding public relations mantra has become only more germane in the epoch of the digital sound byte. At this year’s AIPAC Policy Conference held last month in Washington DC and attended by 18,000 activists, there was a lot of explaining on a key front. In addition…
Jewish Opposition to Guns is Suicidal [DAILY CALLER] American Jewry’s hostility toward guns is irrational and hypocritical.
Published on The Daily Caller Are Jews obligated to do something special when they visit Berlin? I was recently there for a friend’s wedding. Even though it wasn’t my first time in the German capital, I made it a point to again pop into the Neue Synagoge and stroll around the Memorial to the Murdered…
How Liberalism Is Destroying Jewish-American Zionism [NRO] An obsession with social justice, tolerance, and inclusivity has come to roost.
Published on National Review Online A few years ago, someone told me that non-Jewish passengers were starting to outnumber Jewish passengers on El Al flights from New York City to Tel Aviv. It was probably just a rumor. (I doubt that any airline, even El Al, would compile — let alone publicize — this sort of…
My ADL Problem [TABLET] What exactly is the famed organization fighting, and for whom is it fighting?
Published on Tablet I’m conservative by most measures, and I’ve long known that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is markedly progressive on most policy issues. But I wasn’t looking for a brawl. I was simply searching for friendship. Relatively new to the Detroit metropolitan area, I was hoping to become more involved in the Jewish community and…
Why We Couldn’t Solve the Jewish Liberalism Puzzle [NRO] Certain sociocultural causes of Jewish political behavior have been neglected.
Published on National Review Online Given the attention lavished on American Jewish liberalism, one could sensibly conclude that it ranks alongside Stonehenge and Bigfoot as one of the world’s greatest mysteries. Indeed, the “phenomenon” has inspired countless theses, lectures, surveys, and symposia, not to mention innumerable familial quarrels. Norman Podhoretz, the former longtime editor of Commentary,…
How is Obama Not a Jew? [DAILY CALLER] There isn’t much daylight between the Oval Office’s resident and the Chosen People.
Published on The Daily Caller So the right-wing is steaming mad because President Obama – allegedly – once pondered aloud how it could be that he’s viewed as anything less than Zionist when he’s practically a member of the tribe. “You know, I think I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever…
Prophet of Hope [NATIONAL AFFAIRS] Few public intellectuals have shaped America's self-understanding as profoundly as Ben Wattenberg.
Published in National Affairs In Washington, “neoconservative” is fired off as a pejorative so frequently and haphazardly that even the wariest of hawks have been wounded by its stigma. That is why it is so ironic that the Washingtonian who has most unabashedly championed the ideology remains virtually unscathed. “I am a paleoliberal, a supply-side infrastructuralist,…