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On Sunday evening at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., J-Street opened its first ever-national policy conference. Officially founded over a year ago, the self-proclaimed "pro-Israel, pro-peace" lobby was birthed amid controversy. While J-Street positioned itself as the voice of mainstream American Jewish opinion on Israel, critics (myself included) argued it was a left-wing front far from the mainstream.

The Anti-Defamation League is up in arms over two South Carolina Republicans’ revival of an old stereotype. Peter Beinart asks: Is calling Jews thrifty really so offensive? This week, in an act of vicious anti-Semitism, Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer, chairmen of the Bamberg County and Orangeburg County, South Carolina, Republican parties, respectively, co-authored an op-ed in which they accused Jews of taking good care of their money. “Jews who are wealthy,” they wrote, “got that way not by watching dollars but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves.” Then...

Jewish Speed Dating Queen Expands London, New York, Paris, Israel Events By Gayla Goodman Israel News Agency Tel Aviv, Israel ---- October 17, 2009 ..... Speed dating, a highly popular, formalized dating system whose purpose is to encourage people to meet a large number of new people traces its origins to Rabbi Yaacov Deyo of Aish HaTorah. The Rabbi has said it was originally created as a way to help Jewish singles meet and marry. Today, Michal Matityahu, a native of Tel Aviv is ensuring that Rabbi Deyo work is carried on and expanded. "I saw a need to bring...

Tynan: "I was too stupid with my mouth"Irish tenor Ronan Tynan is belting out red-faced apologies today for alleged anti-Semitic remarks he made to a Jewish doctor looking at an apartment in his East Side building -- comments, he said, that were merely a joke. Famous for singing "God Bless America" at Yankee stadium, "Ave Maria" at the funeral of Ronald Reagan and songs for Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Tynan is now striking a chord of penitence and reconciliation. "It was stupid of me to be so callous, and I would never want to hurt anybody's feelings," Tynan told NBC New...

The other day, deep in Rego Park, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, Stanley Moscowitz and Walter Israel sat down at a Formica table for lunch at Ben's Best Kosher Deli on Queens Boulevard. Moscowitz, who's 53 and grew up in nearby Forest Hills, ordered first: matzo ball, tip of the tongue, roast beef, rye, Russian, onions and Dr. Brown's diet cherry drink. Israel ordered pastrami on rye bread. His son Jason ordered pastrami on white. In his defense, Jason did not ask for mayonnaise, but the combination of pastrami and white bread enjoys a certain...

Sixty-four percent of American Jews approve of the job President Obama is doing, significantly higher than both the national average and the ratings the president received from the other religious groups surveyed, according to a new Gallup poll. President Barack Obama Gallup also found that while Obama’s job approval rating among Jews is down from 83 percent at the beginning of the year, he experienced the same percent drop among the general population. According to an analysis from the polling company, the equal rates of decline indicate that Obama’s policies on Israel and the Middle East have not had a...

We'll have what he's having If the idea of a heaping pile of thick, warm pastrami on rye gets you as hot and bothered as the female protagonist of When Harry Met Sally, you may have a problem. Then again, you may just really love smoked meat, like author David Sax. His forthcoming book, SAVE THE DELI: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen, calls for a party of the carnivorous sort. At Deli-licious: A Celebration of the Jewish Deli in New York, garlic-breathed Heebs like Jelvis the Jewish Elvis and Borscht Belt comic...

I’ve seen the future, and it’s black and white. It was a sunny Sunday morning in our Lower East Side community playground, animated by a frenetic blur of whooping kids, my own included. Alone on a bench, I’d neglected to bring a book from home and wasn’t in the mood to socialize with the parents nearby. I opted instead to subject the ad-hoc collection of children to an informal Jewish identity census. Before disclosing the outcome of this thoroughly unscientific survey, it’s important to recall that this neighborhood was once the beating heart of Jewish life in America and the...

HOBBY’S DELICATESSEN & RESTAURANT in downtown Newark may have lost much of its more traditional clientele over the years, but it has held on to tradition. The corned beef and the tongue are cured for 14 days in stainless steel bins in the basement. The salamis hanging on the wall look as if they’ve been drying there, their flavor intensifying, since the Brummer family bought the place in 1962. Samuel Brummer and his sons, Michael and Marc, even make their own matzo ball soup and potato pancakes. But in Newark, as in so many cities, holding on has been tough...

The Anti-Defamation League has raised the alarm over the use of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric by supporters of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya: "From President Zelaya himself down to media pundits and political activists, there has been a troubling undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the situation in Honduras," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "We know from history that at times of turmoil and unrest, Jews are a convenient scapegoat, and that is happening now in Honduras, a country that has only a small Jewish minority." These statements include Zelaya's unsubstantiated claim that Israeli mercenaries were attacking the Brazilian embassy...

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver. Related Articles Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Jews in Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: in the words of the Holocaust denier Let's see how Iran's president likes being called 'the Jew Ahmadinejad' Funny, you don't look Jewish? The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth. The Sabourjians...

B>Temple Bet Shira builds the first drive-through Sukkah in Miami/> If popular corners in Miami have drive-through Starbucks, then why can’t popular synagogues have drive-through sukkahs? That’s what one temple in Pinecrest is promoting for the first time this fall during the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. So, if you can only spare a minute for your prayers, why not make a quick stop at Temple Bet Shira’s drive-through sukkah. According to the Miami Herald, Jews can visit the sukkah starting Friday at sundown at the onset of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The "McSukkah" will be up for a...

"Put not your trust in princes," says Psalm 146, but both liberal Jews and Christians put all their trust in a Prince from Chicagoland in the last election. A prince of a guy who now feels he is empowered to carry out a Revolution from Above (Jozef Stalin's phrase). You can trust this guy. I mean, a black guy with a Harvard Law degree? And he wrote both of his autobiographies like an angel? Women all over the land had Momasms when Obama appeared on TV. Distrust of princes and kings pervades the Hebrew Bible, and to a lesser extent...

Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has exasperated the world with incensed condemnations of Israel and his insistence that the Holocaust is a hoax, but could there be another reason behind his seeming hatred for the Jews? According to a London Telegraph report, his ferocity may be overcompensation … for his own Jewish roots. Examining a photo of the Iranian president holding aloft his identity card during the nation's 2008 elections, the newspaper discovered Ahmadinejad's original family name – prior to their conversion to Islam – was Sabourjian, a Jewish name meaning "cloth weaver." Ahmadinejad has not denied that his name was...

The president's approval rating has fallen to an astonishingly low 4 percent in the Holy Land. As his envoy jumpstarts peace talks, Richard Wolffe reports on Obama's plans to win the ally back. Is Obama surrounded by self-hating Jews? That was one of the most ridiculous—and yet perversely telling—stories to emerge from the last several weeks of Israeli media coverage. Not because the president is surrounded by Jewish aides who want to sabotage their own identity. Far from it. David Axelrod openly reveres the old Jewish deli in Chicago known as Manny’s. He has a sign in his West Wing...

There are so many depressing news lately, every once in a while we have to laugh or we’ll go meshugue! I came across an interesting new blog of mostly Jewish video content. It does have some funny videos, some serious also! Bits that everyone can appreciate and… no, you don’t have to be Jewish even. Don’t listen to the news, don’t read the paper unless you have some aspirins handy and a psychiatrist is in the same room with you. (I can recommend my friend Morrisd, tell him I sent you and he’ll give you a nice discount!) Meanwhile, laugh...

The Anti-Defamation League, the country's leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers?...

Via Facebook: Todd and I would like to offer our best wishes to the Jewish community as they celebrate the High Holy Days. With the celebration of the Jewish New Year this week and the observance of the Day of Atonement next week, we are reminded of the hopeful commitment to renewal and peace exemplified by the Jewish tradition and the Jewish people throughout history. Yom Kippur, the most solemn and important of the Jewish holy days, is a time of reflection and supplication for forgiveness. The timeless human struggle to promote justice, harmony, and peace is seen here in...

JERUSALEM – President Obama is "fed up" with Israel while his administration has given the Palestinians guarantees they will eventually take over Jewish homes and buildings throughout most of the West Bank, a top Palestinian Authority official claimed to WND. "We heard from the U.S. that no matter what Israel is building in the West Bank, it will not affect a final status agreement to create a Palestinian state," said the PA official, who spoke on condition his name be withheld. "The Americans told us (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu might construct in the West Bank for now but we (Palestinians)...

Eight years ago, Yacov Margolese was driving his car, his then 2-year-old daughter Serena in the back seat. He was working that day as a massage therapist in a day spa in Potomac, Md. It was in the car that he heard the news come over the radio, the act of terror that would change the world. In this personal story, it would absolutely change Yacov Margolese’s life. Two years after Sept. 11, 2001, Army Spec. Yacov Margolese took cover in an outpost outside of Baghdad, Iraq, when an enemy missile, possibly a Scud, eerily whistled overhead, its deadly payload...

When my husband Irving was a young man he would go door-to-door around Milwaukee with a Jewish National Fund blue box collecting money to redeem property in the Land of Israel. Although it was during the Depression, everyone put in what they could afford: pennies, nickels and dimes. In the 19th century, wealthy Jews like Rothschild were purchasing large tracts of land for Jews to settle in the Holy Land. The synagogue Ohel Yitzhak in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, abandoned in 1938 after waves of Arab violence - which we recently rebuilt - was originally built and...

These days it seems like non-Jews all over the place are trying to take a piece of Jewish learning or history and make it their own. The problem is that in many cases they are copying Jews who just don’t understand the Torah foundation supporting the traditions. See the “Faux Mitzvah” — a party for 13-year-old Gentile children that skips the religious ceremony part. In some cases the non-Jews are being duped, as with Hollywood’s Kabbalah fad which turns sacred texts into little more than red string bracelets and “holy water.” There are those of the Jewish faith who will...

‘Katyn was not like the Holocaust’ 02.09.2009 11:48 A German Jewish group has said that President Kaczynski’s likening the 1940 Katyn massacre to the Holocaust was “inappropriate”. “Despite total understanding of the pain caused by the memory of Polish officers murdered in Katyn, the comparison is inappropriate and out of place,” said Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan Kramer, quoted in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. President Kaczynski referred to the massacre of over 22,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 in his speech commemorating the outbreak of WW II. “Though not comparable in...

Hitler's symbol of obliteration has become a beacon of hope A Torah once belonging to Adolf Hitler has survived 130 years and some of the worst times in Jewish history. Now all it had to do was make it one mile without being dropped. Piece of cake. The Torah will now be housed at Congregation Ahavat Olam, which received the holy scroll on Friday. It was a four year journey for the sacred artifact from a London repository, but the last leg pales in comparison to what it originally was destined for. Hitler confiscated the Torah and kept it...

Think you've got pressure at work? Consider Rabbi Avraham Bloomenstiel's day. His project will take about 18 months to finish, is guided by more than 4,000 Jewish laws and requires absolute precision. One mistake — or even a badly misshapen letter — and the offending page may have to be buried in a cemetery, according to Jewish law. "Unless the text is 100 percent accurate, there is no point in doing what we're doing," said Bloomenstiel, who was admitted to Harvard University at age 16 to study chemistry and later received a master's degree in music from the Peabody Institute...

Major American Jewish groups say their relationship with Roman Catholic leaders is at risk because of a recent statement by U.S. bishops' on salvation and evangelizing. Jewish leaders say that they interpret the bishops' new document as a plan to evangelize Jews during interfaith dialogue. Jews say they can't participate in a dialogue under those conditions. The bishops had issued the declaration in June. They said that the church doesn't evangelize Jews but will invite them to the faith when it's appropriate. The Jewish protest was made Thursday by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and rabbis

Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. The topic is a delicate one that has already generated controversy, even though a formal draft of the proposed recommendations, due out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the end of the year, has yet to be released. Experts are also considering whether the surgery should be offered to adult heterosexual men whose sexual practices put them at high risk of infection. But they acknowledge that a circumcision drive...

(IsraelNN.com) Many American Jewish organizations have publicly offered words of support for U.S. President Barack Obama's He told the religious leaders, "I need you to spread the facts and speak the truth." healthcare nationalization plans. However, some expressed serious reservations over certain aspects of the likely reforms. On Wednesday, Obama devoted a single conference call to non-Orthodox Jewish religious leaders before addressing over 140,000 other American religious leaders to promote his ideas on healthcare. In his first conference call of the day, President Obama spoke with over 1,000 rabbis and lay leaders from the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements

There's Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve (in better days) and rude waiters, lovely Paris in the spring and stifling and deserted Paris in August, brave fighting comrades in 1917 and waving the white flag in World War II. And then there is the relationship between the French and their Jewish countrymen. France's cyclical anti- and philo-Semitism is the theme of "Being Jewish in France" (Comme un Juif en France), Yves Jeuland's densely detailed documentary film, a three-hour long overview of what one Jewish jurist describes as "a love affair gone sour."

Early in the spring of 1944, when I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I parachuted into Nazi-occupied Poland as the leader of a team of Brooklyn-born commandos. We landed in a field not far from the train tracks that fed Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. My team laid explosive charges on the tracks, destroying them utterly, and then I moved quickly on foot to the death camp itself, where I found Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, in bed. I shot him in the face, though not before lecturing him on his sins. Before...

The Fatah party, which leads the Palestinian Authority, will meet in Bethlehem this week and call for “controlled violence” against Israel, the Saudi Arabian newspaper Al Watan reported. The French news agency AFP also confirmed an Al Watan statement that Fatah will reject the idea that Israel is a Jewish state. The proposed Fatah platform in effect puts on ice any chance for negotiations over the establishment of a PA state. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said that talks with the PA must be predicated on its acceptance of Israel as the home of the Jewish people, which would provide...

JERUSALEM – Marking the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, about a thousand Jewish protesters today read the biblical book of Lamentations in front of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem to protest against the Obama administration's demand to freeze Jewish construction in eastern sections of the city. Tonight marks the fasting day of Tisha B'Av, or the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av. It commemorates a series of tragedies that befell the Jewish people all on the same day, most significantly the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, which occurred about 656 years apart on...

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum claimed to be in the business of buying and selling real estate, but he really bought and sold human kidneys for transplant, according to a federal complaint filed Thursday. The 58-year-old Brooklyn man was accused of trafficking in human organs, after a sting by an undercover FBI agent who agreed to pay $160,000 for a kidney from a live Israeli donor for her sick New Jersey "uncle." Investigators said Rosenbaum bragged about doing "quite a lot" of transplants over the last 10 years. "I am what you call a matchmaker," the complaint said the man, also known...

There seems to be something about evolutionism that generates arrogance in many of its spokesmen. The concept is so wide-ranging that it purportedly can explain everything scientifically, from the origin of the cosmos to the origin of religion. Perhaps because it seems to eliminate the need for God, science itself becomes "god," and some evolutionists think they have become its official prophets and priests. One of their communicants, in fact, calls them its "shamans." He says: We show deference to our leaders, pay respect to our elders and follow the dictates of our shamans; this being the Age of Science,...

The Evolutionist is "Shocked, Shocked to Find Religion in Here" --snip-- Evolutionary thought is, and always has been profoundly religious. Of course that is nothing new--religious mandates have always been influential. What is remarkable is the denial of evolutionists about their own arguments and convictions...

A new document entitled “How can we answer questions about creation and origins?” recommends teaching both creationism and atheism as part of Religious Education in state schools. There are some benefits to this controversial new document, but there are also some concerns. The UK government has released a controversial new document on the teaching of Religious Education (RE) in state schools.[1] The document is entitled “How can we answer questions about creation and origins?” If schools follow these guidelines, it will be the first time that both creationism and atheism have been specifically recommended for teaching in any subject in...

Official correspondence, released under the United Kingdom's Freedom of Information law, reveals that U.S. radio talk-show host Michael Savage's name was placed on a list of people banned from Britain in order to provide "balance" to a "least wanted" list dominated by Muslim extremists, and the decision was made "at the highest level of government," the London Daily Mail reported today. "We will want to ensure that the names disclosed reflect the broad range of cases and are not all Islamic extremists," reads a draft recommendation, marked "Restricted," that was obtained as part of Savage's libel lawsuit against the government...

Life is not a naturalistic phenomenon with unlimited evolutionary potential as Darwin proposed. It is intelligently designed, ruled by immutable laws, and survives only because it has a built-in facilitated variation mechanism for continually adapting to internal and external challenges and changes. The essential components are: functional molecular architecture and machinery, modular switching cascades that control the machinery and a signal network that coordinates everything. All three are required for survival, so they must have been present from the beginning—a conclusion that demands intelligent design. Life’s built-in ability to adapt and diversify looks like Darwinian evolution, but it is not....

WASHINGTON - The House voted yesterday to lift a ban on using taxpayer dollars for needle exchange programs intended to prevent the spread of HIV and other diseases among intravenous drug users.

In a recent post, I explained how James Carville’s new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats will Rule the Next Generation, badly misrepresents intelligent design (ID) as merely a negative argument against evolution. Carville somehow failed to notice that the passage he quoted from our Briefing Packet for Educators made an entirely positive argument for design. But Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, has a game plan and he’s not going to let the facts get in his way. The point of Carville’s chapter on evolution is to turn the debate into a club that he can wield in his...

In neo-Darwinian theory, mutations are uniquely biological events that provide the engine of natural variation for all the diversity of life. However, recent discoveries show that mutation is the purely physical result of the universal mechanical damage that interferes with all molecular machinery. Life’s error correction, avoidance and repair mechanisms themselves suffer the same damage and decay. The consequence is that all multicellular life on earth is undergoing inexorable genome decay. Mutation rates are so high that they are clearly evident within a single human lifetime, and all individuals suffer, so natural selection is powerless to weed them out. The...

A huge crack has surfaced in Obama's Jewish base in the person of Alan Solow, one of the president's closest Chicago friends and long-time supporters. Solow, who was named chairman of the Conference of President of Major Jewish Organizations last December, just released a highly critical statement on behalf of the 52-member group, in which he thoroughly disagrees with Obama's demand that Israel halt all construction of Jewish housing in East Jerusalem, including the Old City -- the holiest place in Judaism.

Facilitated variation is the first comprehensive theory of how life works at the molecular level, published in 2005 by systems biologists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart in their book The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. It is a very powerful theory, is supported by a great deal of evidence, and the authors have made it easy to understand. It identifies two basic components of heredity: (a) conserved core processes of cellular structure, function and body plan organization; and (b) modular regulatory mechanisms that are built in special ways that allow them to be easily rearranged (like ®Lego blocks) into...

July 20, 2009 — He’s a Christian, yes, but he is also a leading American scientist and a harsh critic of intelligent design.  He supports research on embryonic stem cells and upholds Darwin’s theory of evolution completely.  That’s not enough to get Francis Collins off the hook with the scientific establishment.  Both Nature and Science expressed “serious misgivings” with his nomination as head of the National Institutes of Health, even though as the able administrator of the Human Genome Project his scientific credentials have been exceptional. Collins is open about his evangelical Christian faith, but his book The Language of...

Ever since President Barack Obama took office, Jewish leaders have been asking for a meeting with him. The White House, apparently thinking Jewish support for Obama was in the pocket, put them off. But a major Jewish leader says that after Newsmax.com reported on deep concerns in the Jewish community about Obama’s Middle East initiatives and statements, the White House responded quickly by asking 14 top Jewish leaders to meet with the president on July 13. Yet that important Jewish leader, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, says he was barred from attending the meeting because of...

The U.S. State Department made it clear Tuesday that Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem are “settlements,” which U.S. President Barack Obama has called “illegitimate." Reporters covering the daily State Department press briefing have recently asked tough-than-usual questions concerning what they see as the United States trying to determine the future borders of a Palestinian Authority state instead of allowing Israel and the PA to negotiate directly.

Sixty-two years ago this week,the Exodus, then called the USS President Warfield had its name changed for the last time as it embarked on what would be its last and most famous mission, bringing Holocaust survivors to the Holy Land. Back then the British were trying to curry favor with the Arab nations by preventing Jews from settling the holy land, today it is the President of the United States doing the same thing. As the world ramped up to WWII the British caved into Arab pressure and refused to allow any Jews to enter what was then called Palestine....

Obama met (last Monday) for the first time with leaders of selected community Jewish organizations and leaks from the meeting now make one thing very clear. The only free country in the Middle East no longer has a friend in the leader of the free world. Obama is the most hostile sitting American president in the history of the state of Israel. This was the first meeting with Jewish leaders. Earlier requests had reportedly been ignored. Six months after taking office the president finally issued an invitation to stop the bleeding. WAKE UP! The meeting, however, did not showcase the...

Evolution’s Guiding Hand Is Far From Obvious July 17, 2009 — A recent example of applying evolutionism to everything was seen on Science Daily and PhysOrg last week. Some psychologists are telling us that evolution taught us to take turns. “It’s not just good manners to wait your turn -- it’s actually down to evolution, according to new research by University of Leicester psychologists.” Cooperation among animals of a species and between species is well known. These psychologists came up with an evolutionary reason for it: there is an “invisible hand,” they said, “that guides our actions in this respect.”...