I'm an op-ed columnist at The Boston Globe, a purveyor of refreshing conservative cheer in the midst of a dusty liberal wilderness.
Boston, Massachusetts
Joined June 2009
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In 2018 I took my father, z"l, from his home in Bet Shemesh to the Kotel in Jerusalem. At 93, he was weak, ill, and in a wheelchair. I wanted him to have one last chance to daven at the ancient wall—and to be with him when he did.
I think of my father on this Tisha B'Av and yearn to be with him again, when he is restored and Jerusalem is rebuilt.
Nearly 7,000 Marines died in the fighting on Iwo Jima. But when the time came to bury the dead and a Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, was asked by his commander to deliver a eulogy them, most of his Christian colleagues refused to attend.
Nonetheless, the sermon they snubbed — known today as "The Purest Democracy" — is regarded as one of the great memorial addresses in the annals of America. I wrote about it in a @BostonGlobe column a few years ago, and wanted to share it again this #MemorialDay.
bostonglobe.com/2022/05/29/o…
>מִתְהַלֵּ֣ךְ בְּתֻמּ֣וֹ צַדִּ֑יק אַשְׁרֵ֖י בָנָ֣יו אַחֲרָֽיו׃<
The righteous man lives with integrity; happy are the children who follow him (Proverbs 20:7)
How blessed I was to have been raised by such a father. If only I managed to walk more nearly in his ways.
Jeff Jacoby retweeted
My wife Toby and I are in @Israel becoming citizens. At the Interior Ministry, the official reviewing our papers - a Jew who came from Ethiopia in 1991 - asked me for proof that I was Jewish.
I showed him letters from our rabbi. As I did so, tears began to flow.
I told him: “I remember the 1970s and ’80s, when we marched and protested so Ethiopian Jews could come home to Israel. Back then, many questioned whether Ethiopian Jews were Jewish at all. We insisted our Black brothers and sisters were as Jewish as any of us.”
And now, 35 years later, here was a holy Ethiopian Jew confirming my Judaism.
We had come full circle.
Holding his hand, I sang: “Zeh hayom asah Hashem, nagilah ve’nismechah bo” - This is the day God has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Jews from East and West have returned home together.
Am Yisrael chai v’yichyeh.
Days after Bergen Belsen was liberated in 1945, Jewish survivors sang "Hatikvah" — the haunting anthem of faith that Jews would, despite everything, recover their homeland of Zion.
Three years later, the first Jewish state in 19 centuries was proclaimed in Jerusalem.
Jews can be hated, libeled, attacked, persecuted, enslaved, and slaughtered by the millions. But the Jewish people can never be destroyed. 🇮🇱
#AmYisraelChai #עַם_יִשְׂרָאֵל_חַי
Jeff Jacoby retweeted
Today we celebrate three historic milestones: the day on the English calendar when David Ben Gurion declared Israel’s independence, the 8th anniversary of @POTUS Trump’s courageous establishment of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, and Yom Yerushalayim — the liberation and reunification of Israel’s indigenous and indivisible capital under Israeli sovereignty. Happy Jerusalem Day!
Thomas Sowell is a great scholar, but he's deeply misguided if he thinks Jew-hatred is linked to economic success.
Jews have always been demonized, persecuted, and murdered — when they were rich and when they were poor, when they were strong and when they were weak, when they were confined to ghettos and when they were emancipated. They were lynched and expelled by Christians and by Muslims, by communists and by fascists, by illiterate peasants and by Nobel laureates, by pagans in antiquity and by atheists in our time.
During the many centuries when Jews had no state of their own, antisemites routinely turned on them with unspeakable cruelty and poisonous lies. Now there is again a Jewish state — and the cruelty and lies of the Jew-haters rages as fiercely as ever.
What accounts for such unremitting hostility against such a tiny sliver of mankind? Not money or politics or territory. The Jewish people provokes such rage because their existence is a constant reminder that there is one God who created all of humanity, and that God expects people to hold themselves to a higher a standard. It is the oldest, most unwelcome message in history.
Many Jews don't know this. But the worst antisemites in history always have. Adolf Hitler said: "Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish like circumcision."
That is the root of Jew-hatred; everything else is pretext.
To be fair, this video clip of Sowell was from an interview he did with @cspan in 2005. In the 21 years since then, his views on Jews and antisemitism may well have changed.
In Alexandria Township, N.Y., a new banner has gone up to honor the late Frederick Weller, a 25-year army veteran — and the father of my wife and her six siblings.
When my father-in-law passed away in 2016, I published this tribute to him and to the good American virtues he embodied: modesty, hard work, diligence, commitment.
bostonglobe.com/opinion/edit…
I get why the Palestinian Authority, which exists to erase Jews and Jewish history from the Jewish homeland, spews crackpot propaganda like this. What I don't get is why pro-Palestinian Americans (especially Christians) won't denounce such brazen lies.
palwatch.org/page/42100
On this Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) I'm in Rapid City, SD, where there is a statue of each US president. So I visited the sculptures of several presidents whose bond with the Jewish people and support for Jewish sovereignty deserve to be celebrated. / 1
Moments after Israel proclaimed its independence, Harry Truman became the first leader to recognize the reborn Jewish state. "I am Cyrus!" he later said, evoking the Persian king hailed in the Bible for ending the first Jewish exile and restoring the Jews to their homeland. /3
Jeff Jacoby retweeted
As some will recall, @GeorgeWill left the Republican Party in June 2016. (I beat him by a month.) Later, he was asked, "Why did you leave the GOP?" He answered, "For the same reason I joined it: I'm a conservative."
"In the last half-century, over 100 completely new independent states have come into existence," the historian Paul Johnson wrote in 1968. "Israel is the only one whose creation can fairly be called a miracle."
Happy Independence Day, Israel!
1/ My wife and l are preparing for Shabbat in Rapid City.
We've been to South Dakota before, but never over a weekend. The nearest shul is 340 miles away, but when the sun sets this evening, the beauty, light, and peace of the Jewish sabbath will be right here with us.
3/ The house we’re renting already smells like Shabbat (mmm) and for the last hour or so, it has sounded like Shabbat. Soon Laura will light the candles, I will make kiddush, and for the next 25 hours, it will glow like Shabbat.
