Author: David Rutman

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 […]

Scrolling through Instagram, I have learned to steel myself against the flood of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel disinformation and Hamas propaganda. But there’s one thing that left me cold and disappointed. Actress Hannah Einbinder recently posted an Instagram photo wearing a keffiyeh stylized into an inverted triangle—a symbol of Hamas—alongside a shirt that read, “Fund Abortion […]

While I suspect the average American Jewish community member is unfamiliar with Barstool Sports founder and social media influencer Dave Portnoy, that should change. Portnoy may be a controversial figure—he is raw, direct, and has been the center of controversy for years—but his recent social media posts amount to a masterclass in how to deal […]

The timing of this event was moving and surreal. A few weeks ago, I invited Rabbi Elhanan Danino, father of Ori z”l, to address my Young Professionals Beit Midrash at the Sephardic Educational Center in Jerusalem. We scheduled it for Monday evening, May 12. Little did we know that May 12 would be the day […]