Amanda Unvarnished

One cannot get it out of one’s head. The young Israeli at the music festival, trapped, awaiting capture and worse from the Hamas murderers, sending two brief sentences back to his family: “I love you” and “I’m sorry.” It’s the “I’m sorry” that brings you to your knees, because what he was being sorry for […]

We were up late celebrating Jewish life at Columbia the night before the attacks. Our Chabad House hosted one of its largest-ever Shabbat and holiday dinners for Shemini Atzeret, a Jewish festival. It was an overflow crowd. So many Jews from the United States and Israel — and everywhere in between — came out to dance at this autumn […]

There’s a war on. But Israelis are not the only ones in the fight for morality and civilization. If you are reading this from Israel, you are in this war in a way that is clear. We wish you strength, courage, and love. When people ask me whether I have family in Israel — implying, why else […]

As I write, the news is of an impending Israeli invasion of Gaza in response to the horrors of Hamas’s brutal wave of terror. How, everyone asks, could this have happened? Ayaan Hirsi Ali observes that Israel was taken by surprise partly because it was distracted by internal discord. But another distraction she notes is […]

After witnessing Hamas’s gleeful butchery of Jews, we will see pictures from Gaza of tremendous destruction in the days to come. Many of us will be called upon to speak. What might we say? The Torah is a realistic book. It does not hide the reality of human depravity and cruelty. In its pages you […]

My first war in Israel was the 2006 Lebanon war. Since then, I have had an allergic reaction to a number of attitudes that crop up every time Israel is involved in a conflict. The first is the tendency of international observers, both friendly and unfriendly to Israel, to offer the country advice on how […]

What words of Torah can reflect our profound sorrow in this moment? Each of us will forever remember the moment when we first heard about the October 7 massacres. I had just arrived at the community I lead, the Downtown Minyan, my mind filled with plans for that night’s Simhat Torah celebrations. I am shomeret […]

Contemporary military ethics are built around one central principle: Keep noncombatants out of warfare as much as possible. This principle imposes two major rules on fighting parties: Do not target noncombatants, and do not entangle your troops with the civilian population, so that it remains clear who are combatants and who are noncombatants. The 1977 […]

The laughs have been few and far between lately. Maybe that is why it felt so good when Leon Cooperman, the billionaire investor, blurted out on live television that “these kids at the colleges have shit for brains.” Mr. Cooperman, the first in his family to graduate college, took a big step toward achieving the […]

University administrators seem to be surprised that they have been incubating some of the leading and most active antisemites in America. In their reactions to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and then to subsequent outrages against Jewish students and campus communities, they seem mystified. Institutions so devoted to “safety,” “inclusion,” and “diversity” have […]

In the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre, a number of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and other student groups issued statements praising as “resistance” Hamas’s killing of babies, raping of women, and seizing of hostages — all of which violate the laws of war, not to mention basic human norms. We share […]

Of all the immediate reactions by Jewish thinkers to the massacres of October 7, was there anything more pathetic — I mean this in both the pitiable and derisive sense of the word — than the one from Joshua Leifer, a contributing editor for the far-Left publication Jewish Currents? “The loss, the tragedy — incomprehensible,” he wrote on X, formerly known […]

October 10, 2023 The events of the past several days have provided a tragic reminder of the enduring threats to Israel and the Jewish people. We pray for the safety of Israel’s soldiers and civilians of all backgrounds who are under attack, for the safe return of captives, for healing of the injured, and for […]