Author: David Rutman

One of the biggest missed opportunities for American Jewry over the past several decades has been in Holocaust education. We’ve focused so much on the Holocaust we’ve overlooked the aftermath. Yes, it’s crucial for the world to know that six million Jews got murdered by a madman and his Nazi killing machine because they were […]

Abraham Joshua Heschel published The Earth Is the Lord’s in 1949. In his preface, he writes that, “The story about the life of the Jews in Eastern Europe which has come to an end in our days is what I have tried to tell in this essay.” This book is a heartbreaking elegy, a written […]

Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” published in 1884, is sometimes banned because of its constant use of the horrific term “nigger,” yet it is the least racist book imaginable. In fact, it is anti-racist. It is the story of a rebellious young boy in the pre-Civil War South who runs away from […]

This past July, Leo Terrell stepped onto the stage at the Israel on Campus Coalition National Leadership Summit, the largest pro-Israel student gathering in the United States. As he stood before the crowd, he explained why he was wearing a red baseball cap. It was not the signature MAGA hat supporting his boss, President Donald […]

I don’t have a knack for keeping plants alive. Often, I add too much water, or most of the time, forget to water the plant until it is just too late. Sometimes, I pretend the plant will grow in environments in which it is clearly impossible: no sunlight or window in sight. Determined to try […]

Reflections on the Weekly Torah Portion – Shoftim Judges and Officers I can remember one of the first spiritual-psychological Chasidic texts that I studied, a text that opened the gates to a lifetime of study. When I was about 28 years old – 1982 – one of my teachers introduced me to the great Chasidic […]

Sometimes a coincidence becomes kismet—like my recently published book “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza,” and Roman Polanski’s film “An Officer and a Spy,” released six years ago in France as “J’Accuse,” but which has finally made it to America, completing a two-week run at the Film Forum in Manhattan. Both the movie, and […]

We’ve just heard reports of another suicide by a young Israeli impacted by the Oct. 7 attack and the ensuing war. His name is added to the list of Nova survivors and frontline soldiers we’ve lost. The death of the Israeli soldier echoes the life of a young man I am pseudonymously calling Raphael, who […]

Jew-haters have forced the Jews into a defensive crouch that is redefining American Jewry and separating us from the country we helped found. It’s the nature of the fight. By focusing so many of our efforts on defending ourselves, we’re changing the image of Jews in America. Jews are now the people who are asking […]