Yeshiva World News

The folllowing is a Daily News Op-Ed:

Note to pols: Too much is better than not enough.

Or as mom always said, better safe than sorry.

Those words of wisdom are political winners.

Sure, Irene wasn’t quite as advertised. Plenty of New Yorkers grumbled that mandatory evacuations and constant warnings were an extreme overreaction, but history will remember Hurricane Irene as a victory for Mayor Bloomberg.

He was the one who evacuated low-lying parts of the city, who was on TV seemingly at every moment warning, cautioning and coaching New Yorkers on how to deal with what was touted as a killer hurricane.

The foresight and hustle won kudos – some begrudgingly.

In sharp contrast to the bruising Bloomberg took as the city struggled to dig out from the debilitating post-Christmas blizzard, Hizzoner was lavished with praise yesterday from even his toughest critics.

“I’m not a critic today. I’m a fan,” said City Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Brooklyn), who last spring conducted what some called the “Mother of all Hearings” into the city’s disastrous blizzard response.

“I’m sorta disappointed. I emailed some of my colleagues today and said, ‘Damn! I missed my opportunity to have the Mother of All Hearings, Part II.’”

Last winter, elected officials from across the city said they spent the days after the blizzard fielding furious complaints from constituents and getting no response from the administration.

This time they were invited to frequent conference calls and meetings ahead of the storm.

Top city officials responded to emails and calls as the winds and rains pelted the city.

And by yesterday, James said that when she notified the administration of downed trees in her central Brooklyn district, “they responded with the cavalry.”

Maybe it was a little too much, some acknowledged.

Maybe some New Yorkers were inconvenienced by the forced evacuation or alarmed by the panic.

Surely many are steamed at Gov. Cuomo and the MTA for yanking the crucial lifeline of the city’s public transit system for nearly two days, but, this time, no one could complain that their mayor was AWOL.

“He wanted to go from bozo of the blizzard to hero of the hurricane,” said Baruch College political science Prof. Doug Muzzio.

Instead of swooping back into the city from Bermuda as Bloomberg did just before the blizzard, New Yorkers could barely turn on their TVs over the weekend without seeing the mayor giving a briefing or inspecting the troops.

“This was Michael Bloomberg saying, ‘You know what, nothing else is going to happen on my watch,’” said Councilman Domenic Recchia (D-Brooklyn), who helped evacuate thousands of people from his Coney Island district.

“Some people are going to say he overreacted, but you know what? It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

(Source: NY Daily News)

[The following Op-Ed is by Michael Daly for the NY Daily News & was published on March 15th following the Japan earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant disaster.]

Gaze up the Hudson River and hope, hope, hope our regulators are right.

Hope they could not possibly be as wrong as the regulators in Japan who said their nuclear reactors could withstand any calamity.

Hope we never, ever have an out-of-control reactor just 35 miles north – a Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson.
We are assured the Indian Point nuclear plant, which has had its share of problems, is designed to shrug off an earthquake under a magnitude 6.1. That’s a bit above the most powerful one on record in New York – a 5.25 way back in 1884.

We are also told not to be unduly worried that scientists at Columbia University have discovered Indian Point is within a mile of where our region’s two most active fault lines intersect.

The 2008 paper reporting this discovery estimated the chances of a earthquake here measuring a potentially disastrous magnitude 7 are 1.5% over a 50-year period.

Those are very long odds, but as the lottery ads say, hey, you never know.

Can’t you just hear the Japanese regulators saying before their disaster, “What’s the chance of a 9 anyway?”

The Columbia paper noted Indian Point is located “closer to more people” than any other nuclear plant in America, at “clearly one of the least favorable sites in our area from an earthquake hazard and risk perspective.”

In other words, if the folks who built the plant had searched the whole region, they could not have found a worse spot.

Astonishingly, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined even to consider the newly discovered fault lines in reviewing the plant’s application to extend its operating license by 20 years.

“[The NRC] … has not permitted any new information to be used or old information on which the old licenses were based to be contested,” the paper noted.

The same agency quickly removed from its website after 9/11 a report estimating fatalities from a full meltdown at Indian Point for fear terrorists would find the information “advantageous.”

That report said a Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson would pose a dire threat to people as far as 500 miles away and necessitate the evacuation of 93 million Americans and Canadians for as long as a year.

After all the lies at Ground Zero, who would believe it was safe to return?

The mayor on Monday described Indian Point as “far away from New York City,” but you can bet that if a nuclear mishap like the ones in Japan struck it would suddenly seem just upriver.

How safe do you think it feels to be 35 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant now there is the threat of an uncontrolled release of radiation into the air?

A spokesman for Indian Point’s owner, Entergy of New Orleans, Monday reported that the application to extend its license is “pretty far along,” including a safety evaluation whose requirements include hardening against the “postulated maximum earthquake” for the particular area.

If the extension goes through, Indian Point will continue providing a third of the city’s power. The two remaining hurdles are state permits involving the 2.5 billion gallons of water that pass through the plant each day, more than twice the water consumed by all five boroughs.

One permit concerns the temperature of the water after it passes through. The other concerns the fish and their eggs sucked into the 40-inch intake pipes.

Indian Point (above) may yet be shut down not because it poses a danger for millions of people, but because of some shad.

In the meantime, a mysterious pool of water on a floor at the plant led to the discovery last year of a leaking underground pipe feeding a backup cooling system.

And, a transformer explosion triggered a brief shutdown in November.

At least the area surrounding Indian Point finally has a properly functioning warning system after only three years of delays and screwups.

Of course the system’s 172 sirens are just a precaution.

A nuclear disaster could never happen here.

Just ask the regulators.

(Source: NY Daily News)

The following is an Op-Ed written by Al Sharpton twenty years after the Crown Heights riots. It appears in this mornings NY Daily News:

Twenty years after the Crown Heights riots, the city has grown, and I believe I have grown. I’d like to share a few of my reflections about the choices I made, including the mistakes, with an eye toward advancing racial understanding and harmony.

On the day of Aug. 20, 1991, I received a call from Carmel Cato — who told me that he would like my assistance in dealing with the fact that his 7-year-old son had been killed in a car accident the night before in Crown Heights. His son’s death had sparked violence throughout that night, with people angry and responding to what they felt was an insensitivity at best, an injustice at worst.

When I arrived in the neighborhood late in the evening the day after, I could see brick-throwing on all sides. I was living in New Jersey at the time, and though I knew Crown Heights fairly well, I did not know of the events of the first night and second day. I did not know Yankel Rosenbaum had been killed by a mob on that first night. I did not know the full volatility of the situation.

That began to change when I entered Carmel Cato’s house late in the evening of the second night. As he described to me what he knew, I was outraged; I was also saddened and wanted to comfort him and the others who suffered.

I myself was just months away from having been stabbed in the chest by a white male in Bensonhurst on the other side of Brooklyn for leading a peaceful march protesting the racial killing of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins. Though my assailant had been arrested, I was wrestling with how I would respond. My emotions told me to be angry: This man came close to killing me and robbing my very young daughters of a father. My training told me otherwise. Having grown up in the aftermath of the movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, having become youth director at age 13 of the New York chapter of his organization (in the year of his assassination), I had been taught forgiveness and reconciliation.

As I looked at and listened to this father who had just lost his son, what became clear to me, and is still as clear 20 years later, was that the only one not showing rancor and bitterness back then was Carmel Cato. Somehow he had buried his feelings under an impenetrable mask of dignity.

I wished I had that discipline. We left his home and went to Kings County Hospital. I was there when he saw his niece, who had been severely injured in the car accident. I was there when he identified the body of his son. And when we returned back to his home, the streets were ablaze with violence. He and I went to the precinct, where he said that he did not want his son to be identified with any violence. The next day, as I came back from New Jersey, the crowds had gotten smaller. But the rhetoric was still ugly.

My responsibility was to prepare for the funeral of this young man whom I was now asked to eulogize and to pursue some sense of justice for a family that had lost a child who had done nothing but play with his cousin in front of his home.

The mayor at that time was David Dinkins, whom I had known since I was a teenager. He was being attacked by all sides. Extremists in the Jewish community said he was catering to the black community. Extremists in the black community said he was a sellout to the Jewish community. In that climate he tried to strike a balance — a balance that included asking me to not risk peaceful marches. I preached the eulogy, and in the eulogy I said that I knew there were many who wanted me to attack him, but I wouldn’t. Still, I was going to lead marches aimed at calling on the driver to have to account for whatever actions led to the death of Gavin Cato.

In the eulogy I said we must stop blacks who commit criminal acts such as snatching bags on Eastern Parkway, and we must also deal with the likes of the Oppenheimer family — which at the time was trading diamonds with apartheid South Africa.

Extremists seized upon that to say that I was calling all Jews diamond merchants, and I spent years defending the statement rather than recognizing that in hours of tension, one must be clearer than at any other time.

It is not enough to be right. We had our marches, and they were all peaceful. But with the wisdom of hindsight, let’s be clear. Our language and tone sometimes exacerbated tensions and played to the extremists rather than raising the issue of the value of this young man whom we were so concerned about.

The other thing that we should have expressed more clearly was the precious value of Yankel Rosenbaum, who was killed by a mob that night. The fact that I was not anywhere near Crown Heights and knew nothing about the events did not mean I shouldn’t have addressed that in my eulogy — because the real lesson of Crown Heights is that we can’t keep choosing between whose life is of more value and who is a greater victim. All these years later, there are still those who would rather choose victims than help all of us as a society choose constructive problem-solving over rancor and violence.
I later decided to forgive the man who stabbed me. I even visited him in jail. I did it because of the teachings of Dr. King and the example of Carmel Cato.

Twenty years later, I have grown. I would still have stood up for Gavin Cato, but I would have also included in my utterances that there was no justification or excuse for violence or for the death of Yankel Rosenbaum. I would have shared a story about what happened when, as a young man, I was brought to the Jewish Theological Seminary by one of the civil rights leaders who had been an aide to Dr. King.

That day, I was introduced to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Rabbi Heschel had marched with Dr. King in Selma in support of the Voting Rights Act. For doing so, Heschel was attacked by some in his community who were very conservative and thought a theologian should stay in his proper place.

He gave me a book and autographed it and, as we talked, I asked him about Dr. King — the man and the hero.

That’s when Dr. Heschel said to me: “Young man, only big men can achieve big things. Small men cannot fulfill big missions. Dr. King was a big man.”

Crown Heights showed how some of us, in our smallness, can divide. We must seek to be big. Next weekend, we will unveil the monument to Martin Luther King in Washington. I will speak at the ceremony along with members of the King family and the President of the United States.

I will continue to think about the value of the lives of Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum as I look up at the big statue of Dr. King. I will look towards the heavens and I will wink at Rabbi Heschel.

(Source: NY Daily News)

As a former supporter and wanting to return to being a supporter of Bob Turner, I wrote an open letter in which I outlined the steps that Bob Turner had to undertake to win the Orthodox Jewish vote. I noted in my open letter that Bob Turner lives in Breezy Point and that it is a segregated community. I proposed four steps that Bob Turner needed to take to win the Orthodox Jewish vote.  They were as follows:

1. Bob Turner needs to go to Israel now.  He needs to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top Israeli officials to discuss the needs of the Jewish State. He should take a tour of the West Bank and the border towns and see the threat to Israel, up front and personal;

2. Bob Turner should meet with the leading Orthodox Rabbi’s and lay leaders in Israel and the United States to discuss the needs of his future constituents and garner their support;

3. Bob Turner has to appoint orthodox Jews as his top campaign aides. The lack of having Orthodox Jews as high level campaign staffers in his campaign is very telling to the Jewish community and the reason for the disconnect between Bob Turner and the Orthodox Jewish community;

4. Bob Turner has to start personally campaigning in Orthodox areas in a serious fashion. He can not leave it to campaign staff, surrogates or the media.  Orthodox Jews are smart, they want to see the man, not an artificial message.  If you are serious about the Orthodox vote, then go out and meet the people;

After this article hit the web, Bob Turner’s campaign manager, Bill O’Reily replied that Breezy Point is not segregated community any more than Little Italy is. That is a ridiculous statement, belied by the fact that Breezy Point is controlled by a Cooperative Board that has successfully insured that not a single African-American, Hispanic, Indo-Carribean or religious Jew lives in Breezy Point.  This, despite the fact, that it is a gated community which is rated one of the safest and beautiful neighborhoods in the city.  For a man who wants to represent a district that is Jewish, Indo-Carribean, Hispanic and African American and is counting on the their support, this is hypocritical.  It is simple, vote for me, but I don’t want you as my neighbor.

Mr. O’Reily further responded that Bob Turner had previously visited Israel, so he didn’t have to go again.  He doesn’t know when Mr. Turner visited Israel, only that he was once there.  In my open letter to Mr. Turner, I did not divulge to my readers the events that led up to my advice for Mr. Turner to visit Israel.  Now the time has come for the truth to come out. When Turner got the nod to be the Republican candidate, I discussed with Mr. Turner the need to burnish his Israel image. I offered to go with Dr. Joseph Frager and Bob Turner to Israel to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, political leaders and Rabbi’s.  His response was that of someone who has no idea about Jews or Israel “I was there already.”   Bob Turner just doesn’t understand Jews and especially Orthodox Jews and their aspirations.

Curiously, none of the other points I raised was even disputed by Mr. O’Reily, a telling statement by itself.

After my open letter to Bob Turner, Turner did make a single foray into the Jewish Community by going to the Catskills this past Sunday.  I’m certain, given his track record, that this is the first and last time that he will campaign in an orthodox setting.

Bob Turner has never been involved in any Jewish organizations and is completely ignorant of the needs of the Jewish community.  I am not faulting him for his lack of knowledge, it is simply that in his seventy years on this planet he did not have to deal with Jewish causes or Israel.  Yes, he now claims he is an ardent supporter of Israel and Jewish causes, but when has he ever done anything that proves that this is true.  He doesn’t personally campaign in Orthodox Jewish areas. Even after my open letter to Bob Turner, Turner has refused to place a single  Orthodox Jews in the top echelon of his campaign. Indeed, besides Ed Koch, who endorsed Turner out of revenge for Saul Weprin’s, David Weprin’s father, for his failure to endorse Mr. Koch in Mr. Koch’s race for governor, not a single Rabbi, religious Jewish politician or lay-leader has endorsed Mr. Turner.   The lack of endorsements is telling.  Mr. Turner talks a good game and knows the right phrases.  As Mr. Turner admitted to the Daily News in the April 12, 2011 edition, he blatantly panders to every audience and tells them what they want to hear, but he doesn’t really believe what he says.

To date Mr. Turner has done an excellent job in pandering his message to the Jewish community, but his actions and non-actions speak louder than words.  Bob, we get the message, you are pandering to us.

By Asher E. Taub, Former Republican Candidate for NY CD-6

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.

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The following is by Michal Goodwin in the NY Post:

It’s the butt of jokes and has been called a “Magical Mis ery Tour,” but President Obama has scored a neat trick with his Midwest bus trip. When he gets home, he can boast to the first lady: Honey, I shrunk the presidency.

That’s not what he had in mind, yet it’s the only accomplishment of his misbegotten adventure. The highlights are his expensive motorcade rumbling through Iowa corn fields not far from GOP candidates, and stopping so he can squabble with Tea Partiers, propose more taxes, and blame everybody else for everything that’s happened on his watch.

Throw in his complaint about a “run of bad luck” and you have the Obummer Odyssey, a bracing reminder of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” moment.

The magic is gone. Obama’s campaign team has bared its strategy: attack, attack, attack whomever the GOP nominates. Vote your fears, not your hopes.

But wait — the president has a plan to create jobs and deal with the debt, the White House declares. Finally, in the 32nd month of his presidency, he’s going to show his cards.

Never mind. He has a plan, but will release it next month, the 33rd of his presidency. No “fierce urgency of now” there.

First, he’s retreating to another vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. No doubt he’ll gather his kitchen Cabinet to conjure more ways to separate Americans from their money and each other.

His is a fall from grace that hasn’t hit bottom. With 40 percent of the public still approving of his performance, it’ll probably take a second recession for truth to dawn on the diehards.

We can shout at each other over whether he’s actually up to the job, but not about whether he’s willing to make the ideological sacrifices necessary to do it successfully. He is so determined to transform the nation into his own ideal that he’s still pushing the same class-warfare nonsense he did three years ago, though now his record makes his aim more obvious.

Although 25 million Americans — 25 million! — are in want of a full-time job, our president is stuck in political navel gazing. He has a pronounced fetish for self-reverence and, according to many eyewitness accounts, regards himself as not just the smartest man in every room, but also the only moral one.

Everyone else is compromised and limited, while only he is pure and omniscient. Or so he genuinely seems to believe.

But strip away even that contention, and the facts are still the facts. The world is spinning dangerously out of control and America is edging closer to the abyss by the day. Yet amidst a global crisis of confidence, the chair in the Oval Office is empty, our leader pretending he’s engaged and relevant when he’s merely aiming to keep his job.

It’s the art of pretend, where he would have us believe his bus trip is relevant to all that ails us. It is blatantly a campaign event billed to taxpayers, and that alone diminishes him and the office.

Ah, yes, the campaign. The big news is that new GOP hopeful Rick Perry said something stupid. He claimed it would be “almost treasonous” for the federal reserve to print more money for political purposes and that Texas would treat Chairman Ben Bernanke “pretty ugly.”

Stupid for sure. But let’s have perspective. Perry’s words are only self-destructive, unlike the wreckage of the Obama presidency.

READ MORE: NY POST

[Rabbi William Handler]

Congressional candidate David Weprin labels himself a “Modern Orthodox” Jew.

But, is his Jewish religion really an important priority in his life? Does he really respect Jewish values? And is he prepared to sacrifice anything at all to defend those values? Probably not! When push comes to shove, when there is a conflict between the politically-correct values of Liberalism and the Torah values of the Jewish People, David Weprin is on the other side.

His real religion is Orthodox Liberalism. Every Jewish child knows that homosexuality is an abomination, condemned in the Torah. Yet, very recently, David Weprin saw fit to make a highly-publicized speech in the New York State Assembly in favor of “Gay Marriage.”

That’s why Assemblyman Dov Hikind is not supporting David Weprin. Not only did Weprin support the “Gay Marriage” bill in the NY State Assembly, but he brazenly marched in the annual “Gay Pride” parade down Fifth Avenue, waving a rainbow-colored homosexual flag, behind a huge banner proclaiming “Gay Pride.”

Mr. Weprin is entirely alienated from Jewish Torah values. His heart is just not in it. His real allegiance is to the left-wing radicals who have taken over today’s Democratic Party.

He supports abortion-on-demand, continued Federal funding for Planned Parenthood (the largest abortion provider in the U.S,), and Obamacare, which will destroy the Medicare system for the elderly.

He cannot be trusted to loyally represent the best interests of our Jewish community. Since David Weprin knows that Jews are leery of President Obama, he has declined to publicly commit himself to support Obama—“I’m running myself right now. On September 14, (after his congressional election is over on September 13) I’ll be happy to address the President’s election…Don’t read anything into it”—These are weasel words.

Quietly, however, his campaign aide confided to the Daily News: “Of course he’s going to support Obama.”—Of course he will!

Says NYC Councilman Daniel Dromm, who has known Weprin for years: “Politics is his life.”—Orthodox Liberal Democratic politics.

Rabbi William Handler is an official spokesman for Jews for Morality, founded by Rabbi Avigdor Miller ZATZAL.

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.

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Since I was eligible to vote, I have never voted for a democrat in a general election.  I am a blue blood conservative republican.  In 2010, I ran as the republican and conservative candidate for the 6^th Congressional District of New York.  My law firm is the counsel to the Kings County Republican Party.  Indeed, I and my partner have spent the better part of these past few weeks at the Board of Elections and in Supreme Court defending the Kings County Republican Party and its candidates.

I was an early supporter of Bob Turner for the 9^th Congressional seat.  Indeed, when the power struggle between New York City Councilman Eric Ulrich, his chief of staff Bart Haggerty and the Republican County Chairman Phil Ragusa threatened to derail the candidacy of Bob Turner, I did everything in my power to insure the selection of Bob Turner as the republican candidate.  As soon as Bob Turner got the nod, I informed my sources in the media to get the word out.  Despite my busy schedule as a partner in a law firm, I personally attended Bob Turner’s news conference in Forest Hills announcing his candidacy.  As a good republican trooper and being the only religious Jew at the event, I stood on the stage behind Bob Turner and held up a sign that stated “Turner for Congress.” I provided them with their media moment, a religious Jew supporting Turner against the Orthodox Jew David Weprin.

I had daily contact with the campaign and Bob Turner.  Bob Turner’s stances on many issues from medicare to Israel was heavily influenced by my suggestions.  I even wrote a scathing piece on David Weprin, which was published in an influential Orthodox Jewish newspaper, the Five Towns Jewish Times.  The article was posted on the number one orthodox Jewish website, Yeshiva World.com.  As the editor of the Five Towns Jewish Times is a close friend and political supporter, I lobbied him to  support Bob Turner.  As a result, the editor of the Five Towns Jewish Times, Larry Gordon, did an anti Weprin, pro-Turner piece. 

Being a good republican, I blocked out everything negative I observed in the Turner campaign and accentuated the positive.  The more involved I became with the campaign, the more it became painfully obvious that Bob Turner was not going to win.   To win this election, Bob Turner needs to win big in his base of Breezy, Rockaway , Howard Beach, Ozone and Woodhaven  and win the Orthodox Jewish vote.  Bob Turner has failed miserably with regards to Orthodox Jews.  Turner has all the right phrases, but as of yet has shown no substance.

In truth it is not Bob Turner’s fault.  Bob Turner lives in Breezy Point.  Breezy Point is a segregated community.  No African-Americans, Hispanics, foreigners and only a token Jew are allowed to live there.  Religious Jews would not be tolerated in Breezy Point.  Breezy Point is a cooperative and the Board controls who is allowed to move in.  Living in Breezy and his lack of having Orthodox Jews as neighbors has hampered his campaign and his understanding of the Orthodox Jewish community. 

As a result of his lack of interaction with Jews, Bob Turner has never been involved in any Jewish organizations and is completely ignorant of the needs of the Jewish community.  I am not faulting him for his lack of knowledge, it is simply that in his seventy years on this planet he did not have to deal with Jewish causes or Israel.  Yes, he now claims he is an ardent supporter of Israel and Jewish Causes, but when has he ever done anything that proves that this is true. 

As a republican, I see this as a wasted opportunity. Weprin is vulnerable in the Orthodox Jewish Community, but Turner has yet to prove that he can be an advocate for Orthodox Jews.  Orthodox Jews have many unique needs and we need a congressman who understands our community. The Jewish orthodox community will throw their support behind any candidate that will support Israel and support Jewish causes.  David Weprin is a proven fighter for the State of Israel and Jewish causes.   If it is going to come between Bob Turner’s promises and David Weprin’s actions, Weprin will win in a landslide.

What does Bob Turner need to do to prove that he is serious about Israel and the Orthodox Jewish community; Follow the advice I have given him from the moment he received the nomination?

1. Bob Turner needs to go to Israel now.  He needs to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top Israeli officials to discuss the needs of the Jewish State.  He should take a tour of the West Bank and the border towns and see the threat to Israel, up front and personal.

2. Bob Turner should meet with the leading Orthodox Rabbi’s and lay leaders in Israel and the United States to discuss the needs of his future constituents.

3. Bob Turner has to include orthodox Jews in the top echelon of his campaign. The lack of having a single Orthodox Jew as a high level campaign staffer is very telling to the Jewish community and one of the many reasons for the disconnect between Bob Turner and the Orthodox Jewish community.

4. Bob Turner has to start personally campaigning in Orthodox areas in a serious fashion. He can not leave it to campaign staff, surrogates or the media.  Orthodox Jews are smart, they want to see the man, not an artificial message.  If you are serious about the Orthodox vote, then go out and meet the people.

There are only four weeks left to the election.  Bob Turner has his work cut out for him.

Asher E. Taub, Esq. is a former congressional candidate and aide to Bob Turner, and Former Republican Candidate for NY CD-6

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.

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The following Op-Ed by Mordechai Twersky appears in Wednesday’s NY Times:

Khotyn, Ukraine – Here in the land of Tevye, the roosters still crow. Cows graze in open fields. But Tevye doesn’t live here anymore.

I have set out from Israel to Ukraine to trace my ancestors. My first stop is west of Kiev, in a corner of the czarist-era Pale of Settlement for Jews, where “Fiddler on the Roof” was set. Here sits an old Jewish cemetery, now a plowed-over field. It bears not a single headstone, just a house-like memorial for the late-19th-century maggid, or preacher, Mordechai of Chernobyl, my paternal ancestor five generations back.

I continue on, more than 250 miles, to the outskirts of Khotyn, a 1,000-year-old Bessarabian fortress city beside the Dniester River. I enter another open field to connect with a far darker time. I find a 30-foot-long concrete slab, etched at its head with the names, in Hebrew, of 45 men, women and children. First are my grandfather and uncle: “The holy Rabbi Mordechai Israel Twersky and his son, Aaron.”

Following a Jewish tradition, I remove my shoes. This is sacred ground — one of three mass graves in the city, containing in all an estimated 1,900 Jews who perished early in the Holocaust, 70 years ago this summer.

“The earth shifted for days,” an old, toothless man tells me in Russian. He is one of Khotyn’s 15 remaining Jews and among the minyan, or quorum for worship, who accompany me. “They couldn’t bury them fast enough.”

I had never fully understood what happened here in 1941. Growing up in New York, I heard stories from my father, who survived five labor camps before making it to Ellis Island and becoming a rabbi. Not one to subject his three children to horrors, he focused on how his father had lived. On this visit, I wanted also to learn how my grandfather had died.

In the quiet streets of this city, where a Jewish community of 15,000 once thrived, I find no living witnesses. But I carry vivid testimonies written and spoken by Khotyn’s survivors, a guidebook from another era.

The history is complicated; it begins with the Soviet occupation in 1940 of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which the Nazi-Soviet pact allowed Stalin to detach from Romania. The Romanian Army’s withdrawal, and its return a year later with the invading Germans and their mobile S.S. killing units — the notorious Einsatzgruppen — unleashed a systematic Romanian-German campaign of torture, rape and mass murder. Then the Romanians deported some 23,000 Jews from the Khotyn district, which includes the city, to an occupied zone known as Transnistria.

Over a three-week period in July and August of 1941, approximately 50,000 Jews were murdered in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, the historian Avigdor Shachan wrote in “Burning Ice: The Ghettos of Transnistria.” According to the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, 280,000 to 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews died in Transnistria during the war.

They were victims not just of Germany, but at least equally of Romania’s anti-Semitic government. Just days before the dictator Ion Antonescu’s henchmen murdered my grandfather, experts on the Holocaust say, his next in command, Mihai Antonescu, advised top officials about the coming deportation of Jews. The ministers, he said, could be “indifferent if history judges us as barbarians … This is the most opportune moment in our history. If need be, use machine guns.”

On Stefan Cel Mare Street, I gaze at my grandfather’s house. A couple sits outside at a table, drinking beer. What was once a synagogue sanctuary is now a grocery store.

“Your grandfather prayed from that balcony,” says Genya Cherkes, pointing upward and narrating a history her Jewish family bequeathed to her. “On the Sabbath and holidays,” she says, “people gathered below just to hear him pray.”

Ms. Cherkes, now 60, says her grandparents told her they had hidden my grandfather and his family in their orchard (in a non-Jewish neighborhood) after the Russians evicted the Twerskys from their home, leaving them to fear being deported or shot.

I stare at the locals. My thoughts turn to the many collaborators, Romanian and Ukrainian, who assisted the Romanian and German armies in their atrocities. “They entered the homes of Jews with axes in their hands,” Nahum Morgenstern, a survivor, said of the collaborators, in a remembrance on file at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance institution and archive in Jerusalem. “They forced the Jews to undress and took their clothing. Then they decapitated them.”

I am taken to a deserted compound about a mile away. It resembles a warehouse, with large glass windows and a high ceiling. A cow grazes outside. “In 1941 this was a girls’ school,” says one of my guides, a man named Ilya, whose mother survived the war. “Here,” he says of the Romanians and Germans, “they gathered all the city’s Jews, then picked out the Jewish leaders. Your grandfather was one of them.”

I feel that I know this compound. For years, I imagined it as I read testimonies depicting Jews’ being herded into classrooms, gasping for air, debating whether to rejoin their leaders. “I was pressed up against the second-floor window,” Mr. Shachan himself recalled when I spoke with him. He was 8 at the time.

Here, according to testimony at a war crimes tribunal held in Bucharest in 1945, Jews pleaded for their lives with a Romanian police commander who, in quieter times, had engaged Jews in fluent Yiddish. But he told the assembled Jews that day that he had a new name: “My name is Hitler.”

I open my briefcase. I show Ilya an account from the Yad Vashem archives. A Jew, sensing the end was near, asked Rabbi Twersky to make sense of it all. “It will be good,” the rabbi replied, in Yiddish. “One must always have faith.”

We trace the path taken by the doomed Jewish leaders — doctors, lawyers and teachers, but also scribes, butchers and pharmacists — along the Dniester River, where hundreds of Khotyn’s Jews were shot. My grandfather was seen breaking from the line. “He jumped into the river to purify himself,” according to testimony from a survivor, Rachela Katz, cited in “On the Roads of Exile: Memories, 1941-1945” by Solomon Shapira. “The soldiers pulled him out and beat him.”

We arrive at the spot — a foul-smelling marsh — where, in Ms. Katz’s account, the Jews were forced to dig their own grave. There is an eerie quiet. The grass is high and thick. I recite psalms and a prayer for the dead, El Moleh Rachamim (God Full of Compassion). I read from Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

Roosters are crowing now, seemingly louder and louder. To these ears it is a piercing, heckling sound — Tevye’s roosters sounding out an impudent “Taps” for a community where real Tevyes once lived.

A towering poplar engulfs the grave in its soothing, protective shade. “It is a sign,” one Jew tells me in Russian. “Life can still sprout here.”

Time is short. I must travel to Murafa, where my grandmother Batsheva, Rabbi Twersky’s wife, rests. She died there of malnutrition and typhus in a ghetto set up by Romanian authorities in 1942.

Before leaving, I ask Ms. Cherkes, who tends Khotyn’s centuries-old Jewish cemetery and the graves of her forebears, how she can still live in a city where the martyrs so far exceed the remaining Jews.

“You can’t begin to understand,” she says, annoyed by the question but forcing a smile. “You will never understand.”

Mordechai I. Twersky, a freelance writer and broadcast journalist, is a doctoral student in Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

[By: John Freehey]

Barack Obama just turned 50 years old. He is still a young man (by contemporary standards). He still plays basketball regularly, he likes to golf, he enjoys spending quality time with his daughters.

I have an idea for him. He should announce that he is taking a break at the end of next year from politics. Instead of running for re-election, Mr. Obama should tell the country that he is going into private business.

He has plenty of time to run again should he discover that he still has some work he wants to finish as President.

He can always run again. He can pull a Cleveland. Grover Cleveland was the only President to win in two non-consecutive terms, although he lost to Benjamin Harrison in between. Obama can take the high road and leave while the leaving is good.

The President needs some real world experience. Imagine how much better he would do with the experience of having to meet a payroll or worry about the P&L Statement. Imagine how much more sympathetic he would be if he actually understood how his health care law would make it harder to hire people. Imagine if he actually understood that by “spreading the wealth around,” the government actually makes it harder for the economy to grow.

Mr. Obama could start small. Maybe he and Michelle could go into business together. That way he could understand the struggles of small business owners. Of course, as an ex-President, he would also serve on a couple of corporate boards. That’s okay too. Mr. Obama still has a lot to learn about how the big business sector thinks and acts.

By announcing that he is taking a break now, the President can take politics out of the fiscal crisis equation. He could do the right thing to cure the entitlement problem. Since he wouldn’t be running for re-election next year, he wouldn’t have to worry about a challenge from a left-wing primary. He could move to the center and actually get some real stuff done.

If the President did that, he would leave with his reputation in tact. Hillary Clinton would likely run in his place, and perhaps Jeb Bush would jump in the race. Either way, if Hillary or Jeb ran, they would likely win re-election, which would mean that in 8 years, Obama could run again. He would be 58, with a lot more experience under his belt. He would be a formidable candidate and because he would still have a good reputation (because he left at the right time), he would be more popular than ever.

The President care’s about his place in history (all Presidents do). He can be a true hero to all if he announces he is quitting now to gain some more experience in the private sector. Who knows, he might learn something.

John Feehery is President of Communications and Director of Government Affairs for Quinn Gillespie and Associates, Washington, D.C.’s top public affairs firm. He is also a frequent commentator on the political landscape, widely quoted around the country and often seen on such television programs as CNN’s The Situation Room, MSNBC’s Hardball, and Bloomberg Television’s Money and Politics. He is also a contributor to The Hill’s “Pundits Blog.”

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.

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After my article on David Wep­rin appeared in the Five Towns Jewish Times and at The Yeshiva World News website, I was approached by two of my most ardent political supporters, Shimi Pelman and Dr. Joseph Frager. They had a personal request of me: they wanted me to meet David Weprin in person.

Dr. Frager is one of the most influential frum Republicans in the tri-state area and a close confidant of Governor Mike Huckabee. Dr. Frager accompanied Glenn Beck on his recent trip to Eretz Yisrael, where Mr. Beck was enthusiastically received by the Israeli Knesset. Additionally, he is the organizer of the Glenn Beck “Restoring Courage” tour to Yerushalayim this August, at which every Republican presidential candidate will be in attendance.

I must admit that I was surprised that both Shimi Pelman and Dr. Frager were supporting David Weprin’s bid for Congress. Bowing to this pressure, I agreed to meet Mr. Weprin for breakfast. I had one condition: that I be free to discuss every issue of concern to the frum community without any sugarcoating on my part.

As I stood outside the restaurant waiting for David Weprin and Shimi Pelman to arrive, I must admit that I was nervous meeting the person whom I had described in my articles as “Obama with a yarmulke” and as being nothing more than a party hack. As soon as David appeared, he gave me a big “Shalom Aleichem,” and we sat down to talk. I found him to be charming, caring, and modest.

While Shimi Pelman would have preferred I hold off on my attack mode and engage in niceties, I immediately raised the issue of Mr. Weprin’s vote and his support of the gay-marriage bill in the New York State Assembly. Mr. Weprin was taken aback at my directness on the issue and saw firsthand the passion this issue stirs within the frum members of our community.

Mr. Weprin grew up in the home of the famed Saul Weprin, the former Speaker of the New York State Assembly. The Weprin home was a bastion of liberal ideology. Liberalism is rooted in David’s DNA. That David became frum is a testament to the man and his core set of values. Despite the fact that he is frum by choice, his liberal gene is part of his very essence.

Liberals believe that support of gay marriage is a civil-rights issue. As long as in David’s opinion it did not harm the welfare of any religious group, Jewish or other, he was confident in supporting the bill.

Indeed, the bill in its original form posed a risk to frum Jews, who could have been put in a position of being forced to choose between obeying the law and observing their religion.

David, with his bona fide liberal credentials, successfully and tenaciously fought to ensure that the final version of the bill included exemptions and protections for Jewish and other religious groups. His vote for the bill was not cast out of rishus or political expediency, but out of a liberal view that espouses the strict separation of church and state and holds dear the principle of civil rights. I disagree with him vehemently in his support of the bill, but I understand where he is coming from.

David, upon hearing my explanations of why our community feels the way we do about same-sex marriage, understood how I and many in our shuls and yeshivas viewed his vote, why we are so upset about it, and why he has a lot to prove.

We then changed topics and began to discuss his myriad accomplishments on behalf of Jewish causes. One of David’s proudest moments was when he fought for and won the right for frum Jews to continue to perform metzitzah b’peh by a b’ris milah. When David was in the City Council, Mayor Bloomberg’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Frieden, fought mightily to ban metzitzah b’peh. David, using his liberal connections, was able to form a coalition to defeat this affront to our religious practices. In his ten years of public service, David has helped more yeshivas, shuls, and tzedakahs, including Hatzolah and Ohel, than any other politician.

David is extremely pro-Israel and over the last ten years has taken positions that are more in line with right-wing Republicans than his liberal Democratic colleagues. He believes that as a Democrat, he can be more effective at changing President Obama’s position on Israel from the inside, rather than just being another Republican attacking the President. As proof, he offered Steny Hoyer’s recent speech at the AIPAC conference. The speech was regarded as a complete repudiation of the president’s Israel policy. The speech made headlines because it was made by one of the highest-ranking Democrats in Congress, who had openly taken on his president. I wonder what Ed Koch would say to that! It is an interesting theory, one that the voters of the 9th Congressional District must contemplate.

David has surrounded himself with people who are staunch supporters of Israel and true askanim for K’lal Yisrael. He consults with them and has assured me that he will redouble his efforts at truly listening to the concerns and needs of the Orthodox Jewish community.

I dislike what the Democratic Party stands for, especially the liberal base of the party. I was the Republican Congressional Candidate in the 2010 election for the 6th Congressional District of New York, one that borders on Anthony Weiner’s old district. I vote Republican, but I don’t live in the 9th Congressional District. The question is, how will the people of the 9th view David Weprin? It is their decision. I urge the members of our community not to make my mistake, but to look closely at the man named David Weprin before rushing to judgment.

Asher E. Taub, Esq. is a former congressional candidate and aide to Bob Turner.

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[By Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)]

Over the past few weeks, Congress has been engaged in a very important debate. It may have been messy. It might have appeared to some like their government wasn’t working.

But, in fact, the opposite was true. 

The push and pull Americans saw in Washington these past few weeks was not gridlock. It was the will of the people working itself out in a political system that was never meant to be pretty.

You see, one reason America isn’t already facing the kind of crises we see in Europe is that presidents and majority parties here can’t just bring about change on a dime, as much as they might like to from time to time. That’s what checks and balances is all about. And that’s the kind of balance Americans voted for in November.

The American people sent a wave of new lawmakers to Congress in last November’s election with a very clear mandate: to put our nation’s fiscal house in order. Those of us who’d been fighting the big-government policies of Democrat majorities in Congress welcomed them into our ranks. Together we’ve held the line. And slowly but surely, we’ve started turning things around.
 
That’s why those who think that no problem is too big or too small for government to solve are worried right now. They’re afraid the American people may actually win the larger debate we’ve been having around here about the size and scope of government; and that the spending spree may actually be coming to an end. They can’t believe that those who’ve stood up for limited government and accountability have actually changed the terms of the debate in Washington. 

But today, they have no choice but to admit it.

Now, I know that for some of my colleagues reform isn’t coming as fast as they would like. I understand their frustration. I too wish we could stand here today enacting something much more ambitious. But I’m encouraged by the thought that these new leaders will help lead this fight until we finish the job. And I want to assure you today that although you may not see it this way, you’ve won this debate.

In a few minutes, the Senate will vote on legislation that represents a new way of doing business in Washington.

First, it creates an entirely new template for raising the nation’s debt limit. One of the most important things about this legislation is the fact that never again will any President, from either party, be allowed to raise the debt ceiling without being held accountable for it by the American people and without having to engage in the kind of debate we’ve just come through.

This kind of discussion isn’t something to dread; it’s something to welcome. And while the President may not have particularly enjoyed this debate, it was a debate that Washington needed to have.

As for the particulars, this legislation caps spending over the next 10 years, with a mechanism that ensures that these cuts stick. It protects the American people from a government default that would have affected every single one of them in one way or another. It puts in place a committee that will recommend further cuts and much-needed reforms. It doesn’t include a dime in job-killing tax hikes at a moment when our economy can least afford them. And, crucially, it ensures the debate over a balanced budget amendment continues, and that it gets a vote.

This is no small feat when you consider that just last week the President was still demanding tax hikes as a part of any debt ceiling increase, and that as recently as May, the President’s top economic advisor said it was `insane’ for anybody to even consider tying the debt ceiling to spending cuts. It’s worth noting that two and a half months later, that advisor is longer working at the White House and the President is now agreeing, as a condition of raising the debt ceiling, to trillions of dollars in spending cuts.

Let me be clear: the legislation the Senate is about to vote on is just a first step. But it’s a crucial step toward fiscal sanity, and it’s a potentially remarkable achievement given the lengths to which some in Washington have gone to ensure a status quo that’s suffocating growth, crippling the economy, and imperiling entitlements.

We’ve had to settle for less than we wanted, but what we’ve achieved is in no way insignificant. And we did it because we had something Democrats didn’t. Republicans may only control one half of one third of the government in Washington. But the American people agreed with us on the nature of the problem. They know that government didn’t accumulate $14.5 trillion in debt because it didn’t tax enough.

And if you’re spending yourself into oblivion, the solution isn’t to spend more, it’s to spend less.

Neither side got everything it wanted in these negotiations. But I think it was the view of those in my party that we’d try to get as much spending cuts as we could from a government we didn’t control. And that’s what we’ve done with this bipartisan agreement.

This is not the deficit reduction package I would have written. The fact that we’re on pace to add another $7 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years is nothing to celebrate. But getting it there from more than $9 trillion the President continued to defend until recently, is no defeat either. And slowing down the big-government freight train from its current trajectory will give us the time we need to work toward a real solution, or give the American people the time they need to have their voices heard.

So much more work remains. And to that end, our first step will be to make sure that the Republicans who sit on the powerful cost-cutting committee are serious people who put the best interests of the American people, and the principles that we’ve fought for throughout this debate, first.

But before we move on to the next steps, I would like to say a word about some of those who made today’s vote possible.

I’ll start with Speaker Boehner.

It should be noted that he helped set the terms of this debate by insisting early on that he’d oppose any debt limit that didn’t include cuts that were greater than the amount the debt limit would be raised. And he stuck to his guns. The Speaker and I have worked shoulder to shoulder over the past few months, and it’s been a pleasure. He’s been a real partner. We wouldn’t be here without him.

So I want to thank the Speaker and the entire Republican Leadership in the House for standing on principle, and I want to thank my Republican colleagues in the Senate for their determination and their ideas and their support. We wouldn’t be here without them either. And I want to thank my friend, the Majority Leader, for his work in getting this agreement over the finish line. We may disagree a lot, but I hope everyone realizes it’s never personal. And I think today we can prove that when it comes down to it we’ll come together when a larger good is at stake.

I also want to thank the President, the Vice President, and everyone on their staffs who believed, as we did, that despite our many differences, we could all agree that America would not default on its obligations. It’s a testament to the good will of those on both sides that we were able to reach this agreement in time. Neither side wanted to see a government default. I’m pleased we were able to work together to avoid it.

This bill does not solve the problem. But it forces Washington to admit that it has one. And it puts us on the path to recovery. We’re nowhere near where we need to be in terms of restoring balance. But there should be absolutely no doubt about this: we have changed the debate. We’re headed in the right direction.

How’d it happen? Because the American people demanded it.

So, in the end, we’re back to where we started. The only reason we’re talking about passing legislation that reins in the size of Washington instead of growing it is because the American people believed that they could have a real impact on the direction of their government. They spoke out, and we heard them. And it’s only through their continued participation in this process, and lawmakers who are willing to listen to them, that we’ll complete the work we’ve begun. As Winston Churchill once said, `Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; [and] courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.’

I can’t think of a better way to sum up this last year and, in particular, these last few months, in Washington than that.

The American people want to see accountability and cooperation in Washington. And they want to see that we’re working to get our fiscal house in order. This legislation doesn’t get us there. But for the first time in a long time, I think we can say to the American people that we’re finally facing in the right direction. And for that, we have them to thank.

[By Alan M. Dershowitz]

In a recent interview, Norway’s Ambassador to Israel has suggested that Hamas terrorism against Israel is more justified than the recent terrorist attack against Norway. His reasoning is that, “We Norwegians consider the occupation to be the cause of the terror against Israel.” In other words terrorism against Israeli citizens is the fault of Israel. The terrorism against Norway, on the other hand, was based on “an ideology that said that Norway, particularly the Labor Party, is foregoing Norwegian culture.” It is hard to imagine that he would make such a provocative statement without express approval from the Norwegian government.

I can’t remember many other examples of so much nonsense compressed in such short an interview. First of all, terrorism against Israel began well before there was any “occupation”. The first major terrorist attack against Jews who had long lived in Jerusalem and Hebron began in 1929, when the leader of the Palestinian people, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, ordered a religiously-motivated terrorist attack that killed hundreds of religious Jews-many old, some quite young. Terrorism against Jews continued through the 1930s. Once Israel was established as a state, but well before it captured the West Bank, terrorism became the primary means of attacking Israel across the Jordanian, Egyptian and Lebanese borders. If the occupation is the cause of the terror against Israel, what was the cause of all the terror that preceded any occupation?

I was not surprised to hear such ahistorical bigotry from a Norwegian Ambassador. Norway is the most anti-Semitic and anti-Israel country in Europe today. I know, because I experienced both personally during a recent visit and tour of universities. No university would invite me to lecture, unless I promised not to discuss Israel. Norway forbids Jewish ritual slaughter, but not Islamic ritual slaughter. Its political and academic leaders openly make statements that cross the line from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism, such as when Norway’s former Prime Minister condemned Barak Obama for appointing a Jew as his Chief of Staff. No other European leader would make such a statement and get away with it. In Norway, this bigoted statement was praised, as were similar statements made by a leading academic.

The very camp that was attacked by the lone terrorist was engaged in an orgy of anti-Israel hatred the day before the shooting. Yet I would not ever claim that it was Norway’s anti-Semitism that “caused” the horrible act of terrorism against young Norwegians.

The causes of terrorism are multifaceted but at bottom they have a common cause: namely a belief that violence is the proper response to policies that the terrorists disagree with. The other common cause is that terrorism has often been rewarded. Norway, for example, has repeatedly rewarded Palestinian terrorism against Israel, while punishing Israel for its efforts to protect its civilians. While purporting to condemn all terrorist acts, the Norwegian government has sought to justify Palestinian terrorism as having a legitimate cause. This clearly is an invitation to continued terrorism.

It is important for the world never to reward terrorism by supporting the policies of those who employ it as an alternative to reason discourse, diplomatic resolution or political compromise.

I know of no reasonable person who has tried to justify the terrorist attacks against Norway. Yet there are many Norwegians who not only justify terrorist attacks against Israel, but praise them, support them, help finance them, and legitimate them.

The world must unite in condemning and punishing all terrorist attacks against innocent civilians, regardless of the motive or purported cause of the terrorism. Norway, as a nation, has failed to do this. It wants us all to condemn the terrorist attack on its civilians, and we should all do that, but it refuses to live by a single standard.

Nothing good ever comes from terrorism, so don’t expect the Norwegians to learn any lessons from its own victimization. As the Ambassador made clear in his benighted interview, “those of us who believe [the occupation to be the cause of the terror against Israel] will not change their minds because of the attack in Oslo.” In other words, they will persist in their bigoted view that Israel is the cause of the terrorism directed at it, and that if only Israel were to end the occupation (as it offered to do in 2000-2001 and again in 2007), the terrorism will end. Even Hamas, which Norway supports in many ways, has made clear that it will not end its terrorism as long as Israel continues to exist. Hamas believes that Israel’s very existence is the cause of the terrorism against it. That sounds a lot like the ranting of the man who engaged in the act of terrorism against Norway.

The time is long overdue for Norwegians to do some deep soul searching about their sordid history of complicity with all forms of bigotry ranging from the anti-Semitic Nazis to the anti-Semitic Hamas. There seems to be a common thread.

(Source: Hudson NY)

[The following is by Peter Beinart, for the Daily Beast]

While the details of the debt-ceiling deal remain fuzzy, this much is clear: Barack Obama may be president, but the Tea Party is now running Washington. How did this happen? Simple: This is what American politics looks like when there’s no left-wing movement and no war.

Let’s start with the first point. Liberals are furious that President Obama agreed to massive spending cuts, and the promise of more, without any increase in revenue. They should be: Given how much the Bush tax cuts have contributed to the deficit (and how little they’ve spurred economic growth), it’s mind-boggling that they’ve apparently escaped this deficit-reduction deal unscathed.

But there’s a reason for that: Since the economy collapsed in 2008, only one grassroots movement has emerged in response, and it’s been a movement of the right. Compare that with what happened during the Depression. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency and launched the hodgepodge of domestic programs that historians call the first New Deal. By 1935, however, he was looking warily over his left shoulder at Huey Long, whose “Share our Wealth” movement demanded that incomes be capped at $1 million and every family be guaranteed an income no less than one-third the national average.

At the same time, the Townsend plan to guarantee generous pensions to every elderly American had organizers in every state in the union. To be sure, FDR had vehement opponents on his right, but he was at least as concerned about the populist left, which helps explain why he enacted the more ambitious “second New Deal,” which included Social Security, the massive public jobs program called the Works Progress Administration, and the Wagner Act, which for the first time in American history put Washington on the side of labor unions. 

Obama, like FDR, had a reasonably successful first two years: a stimulus package that while too small for the circumstances was still large by historical standards and a health-care bill that while subpar in myriad ways still far exceeded the efforts of other recent Democratic presidents.

And then, unlike FDR, he ran into a grassroots movement of the right. Historians will long debate why the financial collapse of 2008 produced a right-wing populist movement and not a left-wing one. Perhaps it’s because Obama didn’t take on Wall Street, perhaps it’s because with labor unions so weak there’s just not the organizational muscle to create such a movement, perhaps it’s because trust in government is so low that pro-government populism is almost impossible.

Whatever the reason, it was the emergence of the Tea Party as the most powerful grassroots pressure group in America that laid the groundwork for Sunday night’s deal. The fact that polling showed Obama getting the better of the debt-ceiling debate barely mattered. The 2010 elections brought to Congress a group of Republicans theologically committed to cutting government. And they have proved more committed, or perhaps just more reckless, than anyone else in Washington.

But it’s not just the absence of a mass left-wing movement that explains last night’s deal. It’s the end of the war on terror. From 9/11 until George W. Bush left office, the “war on terror” defined the Republican Party. That meant massive increases in defense and homeland security spending, but it also meant increases in domestic spending—such as the 2004 prescription-drug bill—aimed at ensuring that Bush got reelected, so he could perpetuate the war on terror. In that way, “war on terror” politics resembled Cold War politics, in which the right’s desire for guns and the left’s desire for butter usually combined to ensure that all forms of government spending went up.

The Tea Party, by contrast, is a post-war on terror phenomenon. Many of the newly elected Republicans are indifferent, if not hostile, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re happy to cut the defense budget, especially since it makes it easier to persuade Democrats to swallow larger cuts in domestic spending. It’s the reverse of the Cold War dynamic. During the Cold War—especially in the Nixon and Reagan years—conservatives accepted that overall spending would go up in order to ensure that some of that increase went to defense. Today, conservatives accept defense cuts in order to ensure that overall spending goes down.

The good news is that the Tea Party, more than Barack Obama, has now ended the neoconservative dream of an ever-expanding American empire. The bad news is that it has also ended whatever hopes liberals once entertained that roughly 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, roughly 75 years after the New Deal and roughly 50 years after the Great Society, we were living in another great age of progressive reform.

Given the era of fiscal scarcity we’re now entering, those neocon and progressive dreams are now likely dead for many years to come. Meanwhile, the Tea Party’s dream of a government reduced to its pre-welfare state size becomes ever real.

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

(Source: Daily Beast)

The following is a response by Tevi Troy to Rep. Steve Rothman’s (D-NJ) Politico op-ed which claims that Obama is a pro-Israel president:

Rep. Steve Rothman’s attempt to convince people that President Barack Obama is pro-Israel (“Obama’s Pro-Israel Record,” POLITICO, July 25) fails on many levels. While he claims it is Republicans who “label the president as anti-Israel,” concerns with Obama’s problematic stance on Israel extend beyond the ranks of the GOP, in the U.S. and beyond. As The Wall Street Journal noted, even “Jewish fund-raisers for Mr. Obama say they regularly hear discontent among some supporters.” Furthermore, a Jerusalem Post/Smith Poll found that only 12 percent of Israelis consider Obama to be pro-Israel.

On the substance, the weakest part of Rothman’s argument is that it is predicated on U.S. military cooperation with Israel. Most of this cooperation, however, started long before Obama, and much of the credit belongs to Congress – where Israel is far more popular than at the White House. In addition, this cooperation is not some kind of favor that presidents bestow on Israel. It benefits both sides, and it is dangerous for the future of the relationship to suggest that military collaboration depends on a president’s largesse.

Rothman focuses on military cooperation with Israel because he knows how strong the case that Obama is hostile to Israel is in other areas. Obama had Vice President Joe Biden criticize Israel during a visit to Israel. He tried to undercut Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the eve of his visit to Washington. Obama has pushed Israel on construction of housing projects and tried to establish the start of negotiating efforts with the Palestinians at the 1967 borders – which Israel argues are indefensible.

Rothman notes the pressure President George H.W. Bush put on Israel in the early 1990s. American Jews noticed – and Jewish support for Bush dropped by 24 points between the 1988 and 1992 elections.

Perhaps Rothman’s piece is evidence of his concern that American Jews could give Obama similar treatment.

Tevi Troy is a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. A former senior White House aide and deputy secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration, he also served as the White House Jewish Liaison.

The above Op-Ed was originally submitted as a ‘letter to the editor’ at Politico , and submitted to YWN by the author.

Ray Kelly, the police commissioner who should be the next mayor of New York, seems to show you his best in the city’s worst moments. This he did the other day when he stood at a podium with the department crest in front of him and uniforms behind him, speaking of the murder of an 8-year-old from Brooklyn named Leiby Kletzky.

Always when something like this happens, this kind of monstrous and unspeakable tragedy, a death in the city feels more like a death in the family.

So here was Kelly asked to stand and speak about it to the city. He is not loved by everyone in his own ranks, but somehow is trusted more than any New York politician we have right now. Here was Kelly talking of blood on a refrigerator door of a man named Levi Aron and cutting boards and Dumpsters.

And even as the commissioner spoke in the clipped language of the squad room, he brought a painful humanity to it all as he spoke of the randomness of the boy being pulled off the street as he walked home from camp, as if a hand reached out from hell.

“It was just happenstance,” he said in a quiet voice, “and a terrible fate for this young boy.”

Theodore Roosevelt was a New York police commissioner who went on to become President. No city police commissioner has ever gone on to be mayor. Kelly ought to be the first, especially when you look at those lining up already to succeed Michael Bloomberg in a couple of years, and when you remember that Anthony Weiner once seemed to be at the front of the line. Kelly will turn 72 in 2013, but there is an expression from sports that covers that one: He plays younger. And he is a better commissioner now than he was the first time around in the 1990s, in a far more dangerous world.

Nick Scoppetta worked closely with him when Scoppetta was fire commissioner, and if you know anything about the routine turf wars between the NYPD and the FDNY, you know that is hardly routine.

“Ray Kelly has done a splendid job, obviously, as police commissioner,” Scoppetta was saying Sunday. “He has fully realized the possibilities of the job and the responsibilities of it in the modern world, and by that I mean the post-9/11 world.” Then Scoppetta said, “It goes without saying that Ray Kelly is a New Yorker of the first and highest rank, in all the important ways.”

Kelly is not a politician, even if he has always been able to handle himself in the corners, both here and in his big Washington jobs, working as under secretary for enforcement at the Treasury Dept., later as commissioner of the Customs Service. And at a time when most politicians are held in such low esteem, the fact that Kelly is not a career politician is something you put high up on his résumé. Or in lights.

READ MORE: NY DAILY NEWS

Dear Readers,

The recent calamity that took place in our community has had a permanent effect on each and every one of us without exception. In one way or other we were all embarrassed, inspired or traumatized by the last week’s inexplicable cold-blooded murder of an innocent young boy by one of our own.

Klal Yisroel is a nation of “rachmonim” as was displayed throughout Leiby’s disappearance, and the crime committed was the antithesis of our in-borne nature as we know it. In fact, I wonder how many acts of this magnitude has taken place among our own people since Pilegesh B’givah thousands of years ago. Despite the uncharacteristic and unprecedented nature of this act, the chillul Hashem is undoubtedly enormous.

One of the most powerful social tools in this tech savvy era is the common frum blog site. With it we have the right to read the news and openly express our views and varying opinions. Naturally, at times opinions vary, and flaring passions are almost tangible. At times, there are many people who read the blog “comments” who are not necessarily from our community, and there is perhaps room to wonder what they think of us as a people. That said I would like to make a suggestion. Perhaps now is the time for us to take revenge at this tremendous chillul Hashem. We know that the only way to be miskaper on chillul Hashem is through Kiddush Hashem. Why don’t we use this blog to promote Kiddush shem shomaim right here on this site?

My soul is screaming that as a nation we must now be mekadesh Shem Shomaim to counterattack what has happened. Perhaps it is time to be mekabel a small act of Kiddush shem shomaim here on this blog. Writing it down on the comments will strengthen the commitment, and perhaps inspire others to follow suit as well. We have seen hundreds of comments regarding all different issues, how many comments of Kiddush Hashem can we generate here? The act can be something regarding the way we drive, talk on our cell phones, or anything that each one of us feels we can improve the way we are viewed by the “velt”. 

May it be a zechus for little Leiby’s (A”H) pure neshama, and may we merit to see the geulah soon.

Submitted to YWN by M.N.

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.

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[By David Mandel]

As we go into shabbos let us be thankful for the gift we have that we are unable to listen to news reports nor read any websites or blogs. We should enjoin ourselves from reading newspapers as well. We need this respite.
Our minds, hearts and emotions need a break from the repetitive horror news cycle.

We can take this time to think about the events of the week by focusing on how  Leiby and every young beautiful child brings nachas to their parents. We can consider how we as parents will act any different in the way we want to teach our children lifes most complicated lessons.

We can use the time on shabbos constructively by not replaying in our words and images the horrors of the tragedy, the evil of the murderer, what his legal strategy will be or the results of his psychiatric exam. It doesn’t help Leiby, his family or us.

Let’s help each other cope with a good story about Leiby and his family and how magnificently the community responded before and after the tragedy.

David Mandel is the Chief Executive Officer, OHEL Children’s Home and family Services.

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.

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[By Shlomo Katz] 

So it is Erev Shabbos and I don’t have time to write. But my heart is broken and my eyes have spilled with tears too many times in the last few days. One of our babies was taken to Hashem and is now basking in the glow of the Kisei Hakovod. May Ha Kodosh Baruch Hu give his family and all of Klal Yisroel Nechama.

The horrible circumstances surrounding the story of Leiby Kletsky have shocked and horrified us all. Such a pure innocent Neshoma so brutally butchered by one of our own!

I have read so many well written letters and articles, trying to find a silver lining, to make sense of all this, and to try and offer some comfort. They have been written by people greater then me and wiser then me, they are all talking about taking the good from this.

The tremendous Kiddush Hashem that was made, the Achdus, the outpouring of love and concern for a fellow yid. All these writers talk about doing a mitzvah, a kindness in Leibys memory and they of course are right. For me I know that I won’t be able to get through Kiddush, a time that I use to reflect on all the Bracha that Hashem has showered my family with, and to express my hakoras Hotov to Him. How can I spend a warm Shabbos with my family, when another family is shattered? Maybe tonight when we all light candles and make Kiddush, we can shed a tear for one of our own, show HKB”H that we are broken as a family and ask him to reunite us with Moshiach.

But I feel like maybe there is another piece to this tragedy. The videos have shown Leiby standing lost for SEVEN minutes!!!! None of us, none of us, stopped to talk to help this little boy, looking so obviously lost! It was only this monster who had the time for this little boy! I am just as bad as the next, I am always doing one thing to many, rushing to try to get it all done, busy on my cell phone and often distracted. But my Grandfather ob”m never had a cell phone and never was too busy for anyone on the street, he could stop to show his concern and love for any of Hashem’s creations.

Maybe I am so shocked because I just spent a week at Camp Simcha Special, the most magical place in the world, every minute of every day is a Kiddush Hashem. All you see anywhere is Jews taking care of each other, all day long, 24 hours a day, one child taking care of and interacting with another child. And here in the center of one of the strongest Jewish communities in the WORLD a child can stand lost for seven minutes with out of one of us stopping?! Can we actually say as the Ziknei Ha ear must say after R”L a case of Egelah Arufah “ lo Shofchu Es Hadam Hazeh”and now what of the Murderer, it must be that he is crazy, it has to be that he is mentally unstable, how else can we even begin to deal with this, so then what are we doing about it?

We have all seen the elter bochur, the person slighty off of center, on avenue J or M 13th ave, or Central ave, as a Hatzolah member I have seen them, have we taken the time to check up on them, to intercede on their behalf, show them some love, or get them some help?

So we as Klal Yisroel, Rachmonim Bnei Rachmonim, we have received a brutal wake up call. Are we ready to answer it? Will we stop the next time something might not be right, with a child, with an elderly, or even with one of those that makes us a little uncomfortable?

Shlomo Katz is a 13 year veteran Paramedic with Hatzolah in Lawrence

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I don’t know a name for this article. How do you name an article about the devastation that has occurred in our community? What title can you give it? It has surpassed the words tragedy, incomprehensible, unbelievable, disaster, horror and so on. It’s Erev Shabbos and I’m supposed to be cooking. How can I be cooking? Is this Shabbos going to be normal? Can I even show up to shul and not burst into tears before the Ribbono Shel Olam?  We have all been shaken to our core. The following is a narrative and personal reflection on this week’s events.

On Tuesday night I contacted the coordinators of Hatzalah of Union County and asked if we could organize a crew to go help in the search for Leiby A’H. I had seen postings on YWN and elsewhere that volunteers were needed.  I was afraid of what can be termed rescuer fatigue; that people were just getting burned out by searching and not hearing any good news for a long while. It takes an emotional toll and I was afraid that the numbers of searchers would be diminished.

As soon as I got the approval, another Union County member, Chaim Cillo, joined me and we drove one of our ambulances into Brooklyn. We decided to show up at the Boro Park command post. Another member, Shlomo Spiro, was going to meet us there.  We showed up and were directed to search a large swath of Brooklyn as we had a vehicle. Since they were assigning groups of 5, we needed to take on 2 more people. We took on two brothers that were terribly eager to start searching.

The throngs of people I saw at the Boro Park command post, even at that late hour, are a testament to the amazing achdus we have for one another. We were a motley crew of leather, knit and velvet yarmulkes. We were a sea of polo, button down, white, and striped shirts. A crowd of long and short hair, chups, payos, and sideburns. Someone in the crowd around the command center piped up and said to a Hatzolah member in the command center “whatever needs to be done, we’ll do it”. It was a moment that shook me in its striking similarity to “Na’aseh V’nishmah”.  These people were doers. A search needed to be done? We will do it!  Our Leiby A’H was missing!!

Our area took approximately five hours or so. Five hours of painstakingly looking in every driveway, every, backyard, and every gold or similarly colored car for any clue whatsoever.  It was gut wrenching.  We met countless other groups and even single people in cars and on foot that just took to the streets to help out. Those of us in emergency services know all too well the correlation between  time missing and outcomes when dealing with an abducted child. Nearing the end of our area I was nauseous, and we came back to the command center empty handed and heavy hearted.  The coordinators at the center thanked us and we drove off in the early hours of the morning back to New Jersey.

After arriving home, my partner Chaim texted me the dreaded news. He didn’t even say the news. He just told me to go to YWN, but I knew what I was about to read. I sat there for a moment staring and squinting at the little screen on my phone. I felt violated. Once my car was burglarized, and I was outraged that someone would just take what was not theirs to take.  This was thousands of times that feeling. Leiby A’H was not his to take! I was so furious and hurt like a part of me had been ripped away and stolen. Leiby A’H had been ripped away and stolen. I was angry that I couldn’t do more. And then I was just sad, tides of agmas nefesh washed over me like so many waves at a beach.

Throughout history we have examples of Hashem sending messages about what He wants us to do. Sometimes we are resistant and He sends us ever increasingly strong and awful messages. Many op-eds and comments on various threads around the net have come up with lessons to be learned and things to change, but you don’t need another one preaching at you. Certainly no human has the answer to why Hashem does things and it would be foolish of me to even think that I have inkling of an answer, or that I know the lesson to be learned.  So I am just going to share with you a personal commitment that I am going to take upon myself.

The message that I am going to glean from this experience is that Hashem wants me to continue to propagate the sense of love and achdus that was palpable at that command center. Therefore, I am going to work on increasing my love, care, and achdus for my fellow Jew. I am going to work on my ability to observe those around me and let them know by my actions, that I care for them and though we may dress and speak differently, and though we may daven in different shuls and from different siddurim,  we stand together as Am Yisrael.  I thank you for indulging me in my catharsis. I would be most honored if you would all join me on my journey.

Joel Sebbag is a paramedic and a respiratory therapist. He is also the director of maintenance for Hatzalah of Union County.

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[By Mendel Klein]

We are all still in shock. Leiby Kletzky, a young boy from our community is not with us anymore.

He was only 9 years old. He wanted to be a big boy. He wanted to walk home from summer camp alone. But he got lost walking the streets of his Brooklyn neighborhood.

Trying to find his way, evil itself lured him into a car. A 35 year old man took the innocent, defenseless young boy home where he killed him and desecrated his body.

There really isn’t much to say, and even if there is I surely am not the one.

Thousands of people came out to search for young Leiby in the days we were still hoping to find him alive and well. When their efforts turned up futile, thousands more came out to attend Leiby’s heart-wrenching funeral. People from all walks of life came together to help and, thereafter, to mourn together.

Today people are scared.

It could have been my child. It could have been my sibling. It could have been my neighbor. It was one of us. Innocence itself was murdered. Our basic sense of security has been shattered.

For many parents, these fears are automatically translated into a decision to never allow our kids out of our sight. All over the news people are now proclaiming that it’s an age in which no one is safe anymore, and children should not be given any independence.

This response is natural. What happened to Leiby is so unnerving that we reflexively go into the fetal position in an attempt to protect our kids and loved ones while hiding in a corner.

But is this response realistic? Is this reaction healthy? Is it beneficial for our children?

We all remember how after 9/11 people were hesitant to fly on airplanes. The airline suffered tremendous financial losses. People decided not to go into tall buildings. There was a virtual freeze of all high-rise office rentals.

People’s reflexive response was that every airplane is a missile and every tall building is a target. As life returned to normal, people started flying again, entered and stayed in high-rise buildings, and started to realize that this reflexive reaction to tall buildings and airplanes was not realistic.

Resuming normal life after a tragedy of that magnitude felt weird. People were afraid that by going about our daily life we’ll forget about what happened on that horrible day. We were afraid that it might signify that we in some way forgive those who took the lives of so many innocent lives.

It felt weird, yet we slowly resumed our lives. We did not forget. We did not forgive. We simply decided that terror will not prevail.

What happened to Leiby is in no way the fault of his parents who allowed him to walk home alone. It of course is not the fault of his own. Call it fate. Call it coincidence. Call it what you want. What happened to Leiby is the fault of the murderer that took this young innocent life. Leiby was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

After 9/11 we were repeatedly told not to allow the terrorists to win. They wanted to sow fear in our hearts, and by fearing everyday life we would be allowing them to achieve what they set out to do.

I believe the same applies when we assess how to react to this tragedy. We can remember Leiby in two ways: A memory of fear or a memory of love.

We can turn paranoid and consider every person we don’t know thoroughly as a potential murderer. We can stop allowing our children to go and play in the park. We can disallow our kids from going to the corner shop for some ice cream. We can live a life of fear and instill fear and doubt in our children’s hearts based on the horrible tragedy that happened to Leiby.

Or  we can become a more unified and loving people. In these trying times we can point out to our kids how thousands of “strangers” came out and searched for little Leiby in the burning July heat. We can be in awe of the thousands of people, again “strangers,” who never met Leiby but attended his funeral and sobbed in public as if it were their own child. We can decide that the action of one murderer will not define how we raise our children, that terror will not prevail.

It is crucial to teach our children about stranger danger. But in memory of Leiby let’s not teach our children that all strangers are evil.

It is important for children to know what to do in case they get lost. But in memory of Leiby let’s not take away any and all independence from our children.

It is ok to teach children to use caution around people they don’t know. But in memory of Leiby let’s not instill fear and paranoia in our children’s hearts.

It is good to know where our kids are at all time. But in memory of Leiby let’s not lock our children up in our houses.

Let’s commemorate Leiby’s memory as one of love, not one of fear.

Mendel Klein is a parent and a pediatric occupational therapist.

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.

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