Before Europe casts us off completely, perhaps we should separate first. It’s time, I maintain, to say goodbye. This week, on Yom Hashoa, a friend told me a story I had never heard—how her father as a young Jew in Libya during World War II was arrested by the Italians and later, after the Nazis…

Prior to Wednesday at 3 a.m. the majority of Israelis supported a war they hoped would result in a fundamental alteration of their reality. The ceasefire seems to have smashed those hopes. This piece was published last Thursday in The Free Press. Since then, the challenges facing Israel have only multiplied. The American mainstream media,…

One view of the ceasefire spells strategic disaster, the other, hope. Whichever perspective, Israel must prepare for the ongoing confrontation with Iran and its proxies. There are two ways of looking at the missiles fired by Iran at Israel on Wednesday morning after the United States announced a ceasefire. One way spells strategic disaster for…

America’s national derangement poses almost insurmountable challenges to supporters of the Jewish state.   For the past 50 years, in capacities both official and voluntary, before the American press, on campuses, and in a corpus of op-eds, I have spent most of my time defending the state of Israel. Though not always keen to justify…

Iran and the fifty-year parade of ignored evidence. On February 28, the United States and Israel struck Iran. Khamenei killed and soon replaced. Oil markets in crisis, Iranian missiles targeting NATO facilities, and yet European leaders are saying, “This is not our war.” We are watching this and asking, how does this end? To me,…

Unlike the Wise Son who acknowledges that Jewish law and Jewish life are complicated and approaches them as a Jew, the Wicked Son sets himself apart from his people and doesn’t really bother to ask. When, last January, he was accosted by pro-Palestinian protesters who accused him of being a “genocide denier,” a “liberal Zionist…

Despite the close partnership between Trump and Netanyahu and the truly historic cooperation between the U.S. armed forces and the IDF, America and Israel inhabit utterly different realities. In the classic 1970 film “Patton,” the famous World War II general visits the North African front where a senior British commander assures him that the Royal…

Israel and its supporters must combat the slanderous claim, from right and left, that Jews have dragged America into a futile war What do New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, antisemitic podcaster Tucker Carlson, Progressive politician Bernie Sanders, and the lunatic influencers Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes all have in common? Each has accused Israel,…

Critics think the war with Iran is like Afghanistan. It’s much more like the Cold War.   Everybody knows how wars begin but nobody knows how they end. In the last couple of weeks, the question of how the United States and Israel can conclude their war with Iran has become the most frequently asked…

About Iran, in particular, there was no shortage of the stories we told ourselves. There is a great expression in colloquial Hebrew that defies translation into other languages. It goes like this: “These are bedtime stories that we tell ourselves.” Though the image comes to mind of parents putting their children to bed and reading…