Author: David Rutman

The Democratic party has hit the abyss. As Shane Goldmacher wrote this week in The New York Times, “[the party’s] standing has plunged to startling new lows — 27 percent approval in a recent NBC News poll, the weakest in surveys dating to 1990.” This is not a nasty MAGA opinion; it’s a sober, factual […]

Elias Rodriguez could have yelled words like “genocide” and “apartheid” after he murdered two young Israelis in Washington last week. Instead, he uttered the “Free, free Palestine” chant that has inundated college campuses and city streets since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023. Why did he go for “free Palestine” rather than more lethal […]

Dear Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Sanders, The tragic murder of a young Jewish couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum last week is a stark reminder of the consequences of unchecked and irresponsible extremist rhetoric and the failure to address rising antisemitism. As public servants, you have a duty to foster a climate of safety and […]

Most call it last Thursday. Jews call it Erev Lag Ba’omer – which in Israel is campfire night. And I call that Thursday: another day in our rollercoaster paradise. It started with my Republican friends feeling betrayed by Donald Trump’s “turn against Israel,” and my Democratic friends seeming more thrilled that they were vindicated than […]

The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) held a security briefing over Zoom on May 22 addressing the shooting that occurred in Washington, D.C. the previous night where two staff members of the Israeli embassy were killed. The two victims have been identified as Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26. Lischinsky had been planning […]

“I love Jerusalem, I love Israel, and because of the global boycott of Jewish and Israeli writers, I especially made a point to come here, to the Jerusalem International Writers Festival.” With these moving words, standing before an enthusiastic sold out crowd in Mishkenot Sha’anim, Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL) opened his talk this past Monday night. […]

It’s 2:53 a.m. I’ve woken up six times since closing my eyes at 11:00 p.m., and no—it’s not the jet lag. I know exactly what’s keeping me awake. I’m in Israel with 16 eighth-grade students from Sinai Akiba Academy, many experiencing their ancestral homeland for the first time. We arrived with excitement, loaded our bags […]

You expect a comedian to make you laugh. If it’s a superstar like Seinfeld or Chapelle, you expect to really, really laugh. And if a serious bit occasionally comes up, it’s usually as a set-up for a killer joke. The point is always the joke. There’s an implicit contract between the comic on stage and […]

In his introduction to the Shemirat Shabbat Kehilchatah, Rabbi Yehoshua Neuwirth writes about his experiences as a teenager during World War II, when he and his family hid inside a cramped attic in Amsterdam. He writes that: …we also had no calendar by which we could know the dates of the holidays. Through a Kitzur […]

Nearly forty years ago, Professor Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago wrote one of these seminal books that end up becoming a permanent fixture of the cultural discourse, a la George Orwell’s “1984.” Bloom’s book was titled “The Closing of the American Mind,” and one reason for its lasting impact is that it has […]