Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
My father arrived in America from Germany in 1939, 75 years ago. It was March 17, St. Patrick’s Day—a holiday my father had never heard of—and New York City’s marching bands and colorful parade amazed him. If this was how America welcomed immigrants, it was truly fantastic. St. Patrick’s Day would become my family’s special … Read more
So what happens when you live in a country where people take potshots at you every other day or so? Well, unless something like October 7th happens, or Islamists blow themselves up, you get pretty used to dealing with the peril and get on with your life. Hamas and Hezbollah have been lobbing rockets at … Read more
Professor Muhammad Abdou, who until recently taught students at Columbia University, appeared online this week to spread calls for religious-based violence and glorify the murder of Jews. He did so as part of an event at the Union Theological Seminary, an institution associated with Columbia. While the university recently ended Abdou’s teaching, it is important … Read more
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has released propaganda footage of an underground complex it calls “Missile City,” a vast network of tunnels packed with suicide drones and ballistic missiles. The video, complete with a ticking clock and endless rows of Shahed drones and rockets, was released days after the US-Israeli strike that eliminated Supreme … Read more
Tonight the celebration of the holiday of Purim begins. Purim is a Jewish holiday often neglected outside the more religious communities in America and Israel because it commemorates an attempt to exterminate the Jews. If Purim had concluded with a lesson on tolerance, liberal Jews might be more inclined to celebrate it. Unfortunately it ends … Read more
In the eighteen months I have been writing a near-weekly column for Catholic Culture, I have not been shy on the topic of Catholic-Jewish relations in the shadow of the Israel-Gaza War. You can read my previous work on the topic here, here, here, here, here, here and here. My emphasis has been that Catholics … Read more
Failing to mention the Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day reflects a deep moral sickness. It’s not often we can say JD Vance and the BBC have something in common. The bruising VP of the United States and the lily-handed woke-mongers of Britain’s public broadcaster probably disagree on every big topic. But this week, briefly, they … Read more
Many news organizations carried the story of the release of Bar Kuperstein two years after he had been kidnapped by Hamas on October 7. Kuperstein was a young security guard at the Nova Festival, the music festival targeted by Hamas for its fat genocidal possibilities, with sides of rape, torture, and kidnapping. After taking some … Read more
It’s not about Israel. It’s about convincing Jews everywhere to let themselves be killed by Muslim terrorists. If Not Now, is an anti-Israel BDS group, whose gimmick is pretending it’s an organization of “Jewish youth.” (In reality, many of its members are not Jewish and it’s a typical far leftist organization.) There was a period … Read more
On Sunday, a Chabad Hanukkah candle-lighting at Bondi Beach was turned into a massacre. At least 16 people are dead. Witnesses report that the terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar” between bursts of gunfire. What should have been a moment of communal joy became a scene of mass murder, carried out in full view of a society … Read more
Ahead of this year’s celebration of Hanukkah, here are eight important facts about the holiday: 1. Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday that commemorates an ancient national liberation struggle in the Land of Israel, unlike Passover, Sukkot/Tabernacles, and Shavuot/Pentecost, which commemorate the liberation from slavery in Egypt to independence in the land of Israel, and … Read more
Each December, as holiday decorations go up and familiar music fills the air, another relatively new holiday ritual returns with equal predictability — social media fills with declarations that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” often joined by the equally fictional assertion that he was a “Palestinian refugee.” These claims appear every Christmas season as reliably as … Read more
Last month, Communist China launched its largest ever crackdown on Christians. The raids across Beijing, Shanghai and eight other cities mark the beginning of an escalation as the paranoid Xi regime sets out to suppress the growing number of Chinese Christians. While the Communist regime claims that the official number of Christians in China is … Read more
The ancient rot at the heart of anti-Israel activism. . . . The surge of anti-Jewish hostility is particularly concerning in light of what sparked it: meticulously planned pogroms in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, followed by the abduction of hundreds of innocents. The hostages were condemned to terrorist captivity, where they endured physical … Read more
Senator Ted Cruz is trying to wake people up to what he sees as a growing crisis on the right. He has taken to saying that if he were to post “Good morning” on the social media platform X, within minutes he would be deluged by hundreds of blatantly antisemitic replies. It’s not much of … Read more
There I was last week, standing on the rooftop of the AISH Institute for Women’s Education, flour dusting my blue apron, watching dozens of young women with their hands kneading dough. The Jerusalem skyline stretched out behind us like God’s own backdrop for our first-ever challah bake at the new seminary in the heart of … Read more
The much-discussed Tucker Carlson interview of the Holocaust-denying, Hitler-admiring, white-nationalist, anti-liberal MAGA influencer Nick Fuentes has brought some of the online cesspool into mainstream discussion, exposing a potential fault line in the project to build the political right’s post-Trump future. For the right, the only way out of the awful ugliness in some of its … Read more
The Heritage Foundation task force that President Kevin Roberts is citing as evidence of his commitment to fighting antisemitism is rapidly coming undone. The co-chairs of the Heritage Foundation’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism sent an email to members on Tuesday afternoon listing the demands they have made of Roberts, including that he delete … Read more
Six months ago, I wrote a speculative column that the pandemic had a lot to do with killing the power of taboos in our society, including the taboo against antisemitism. The pandemic drove conversation online, and it saw one authority after another discredit itself. It was a period of time when people were “canceled” or … Read more
Islam is the mask that leftists wear when they attack us. The Left is the mask that Muslims wear when they attack us. What the last part of that means is that Islamists seek to redefine, normalize and justify every Islamic atrocity using the language of social justice. After the latest Muslim terrorist attack on … Read more
Jews are living in an era of our grand family reunion. After 1900 years of wandering the world, now we can all meet up at Pico Glatt. “I hate that question!” the woman cried out after I asked her husband whether he was Ashkenazi. The woman was offended that I would ask that. “We’re all … Read more
After the atrocity of Oct. 7, Hamas knew that Israel would have to respond ferociously against the terror group to regain deterrence. With their fighters nestled among civilians in dense urban areas, and thousands of tunnels positioned under schools, homes, mosques and hospitals, Hamas also knew that no army in the world could avoid major … Read more
The best evidence for this is the way so many of the people who scream about Israel’s “apartheid” and “genocide” do not much care about apartheid and genocide elsewhere. China has real apartheid because it practices Han supremacy. Ethnic minorities have fewer rights in China. They are second-class citizens, denied the right to internal migration, … Read more
Guns & Moses | Official Teaser | Mark Feuerstein | Neal McDonough | Christopher Lloyd Guns & Moses director Sal Litvak highlighted the importance of his new film’s theatrical release, noting the rise of antisemitism and hate against people of faith. The film is an action thriller that details the journey of a … Read more
Why we must tell the truth about what happened in Boulder. In 2021, a Syrian Muslim gunman opened fire at a Boulder supermarket killing ten Americans. Ahmad Al-Issa, the gunman, had been convinced that Americans were ‘Islamophobic’ and his family had moved from what would become the ISIS capital in Syria. The Al-Issa family lived … Read more