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A Bad Taste in the Mouth
The New York Times newspaper. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – For several years now, my media consumption habits have been guided in part by what I call my “escape routes.”
As someone who spends his days immersed in reports and analysis of news events that are extraordinarily depressing—war and conflict in Europe and the Middle East, the inexorable rise of antisemitism and other forms of prejudice, the historical precedents for the difficult political questions we confront today and much else on similar lines—I need these escape routes for the good of my mental health. They also remind me that while I’m paid for the privilege of writing and thinking about politics and international affairs, millions of people pursue careers and projects that have nothing to do with my concerns, which is precisely why I use the term “escape routes” when I read about their endeavors. They are a window onto the calmer and more leisurely world that exists out there, and my visits fortify me when I go back to the issues that matter to me both professionally and personally.
It’s why I read the sports pages, to monitor the teams I follow and read what the coaches and players are saying. It’s why I read music reviews, to check up on whether my favorite bands are in the studio or if they are touring, and hopefully, discover some new gems. It’s why I adore restaurant reviews, not just of establishments in the cities where I live or work but of eateries further afield. This—all of this—is a harmless escape, a chance to read some decent writing that isn’t about politics, allowing me to return to my own writing feeling refreshed.
But I have to tell you, this method isn’t really working anymore.
In the last six months, since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel unleashed a war that has dominated the media, I’ve seen my escape routes pulled into my professional concerns. The sports pages have been littered with reports of discrimination against Jewish athletes, such as the firing of South Africa’s U-19 cricket team captain because he is Jewish, or the refusal of the Irish women’s basketball team to stand respectfully for the “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, immediately prior to a contest in which, happily, they were trounced by their Israeli opponents. Music has become a cesspool of artists, including some whose songs I love, with them signing up to various boycott initiatives targeting Israel alone, leaving cutting-edge Israeli acts—like the electronic duo Red Axes, whom I interviewed recently—feeling isolated and rejected. And now, I’ve discovered that even restaurant reviews, of all things, are no longer immune from any mention, let alone criticism of, Israel’s military actions in Gaza. The disapproval and the resentment are pervasive, seeping into the corners of websites and news outlets that would normally have no business discussing Israel and the Palestinians, or any other conflict (and, of course, they don’t tend to discuss those other conflicts.)
Over the last week, I’ve encountered two items on the food pages like this. The first was the eagerly awaited New York Times list of the top 100 restaurants in the city. I clicked on that in order to see whether I’d visited any that made this year’s selection, as well as choose some of the establishments where I’d like to go. I didn’t think (because there was no reason to think) that the Gaza war would show up here, but it did.
The food critic at the Times, Pete Wells, classified one restaurant—Falafel Tanami, in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, at number 65—as “Israeli.” In the accompanying paragraph describing the food, Wells didn’t mention the word “Israel” or talk about the conflict once. Instead, he waxed lyrically about the quality of the falafel balls served there. But that wasn’t the case with the restaurant that came in at number 74—Ayat, an eatery that is also in Brooklyn that Wells classified as “Palestinian.” In this case, Wells used half of his allotted paragraph to tell us that its main location features a mural of “Palestinian children behind bars under the Aqsa Mosque, between the phrases ‘down with the occupation’ and ‘live in peace,’” adding that as “Ayat has multiplied locations, it has kept up its paired messages of peace and support for the people of Palestine.” I came away from reading that wondering whether the recommendation was for the food or for the politics. Needless to say, none of the other cuisines emanating from countries that are also global trouble spots—Nigeria, Mexico and Korea, among them—warranted similar treatment.
After the Times, it was The Guardian. That paper, which is known for its harsh coverage of Israel, published a review last weekend of a non-kosher, Ashkenazi-style deli in North London by its food critic, Jay Rayner. I knew that Rayner was Jewish, in part because I’d seen some good-natured joshing from some of his Jewish readers about his fondness for pork and seafood dishes. But that didn’t prepare me for what I read.
Rayner did spend most of the review talking about the food, which he said he enjoyed, while noting that the chicken-soup broth needed more salt. But then came the clincher: “Could I really write about a Jewish restaurant given the current political turmoil? Would I get abuse for doing so?” Rayner wrote. “Surely better to keep shtum. At which point I knew I had no choice: I had to write about it. The horrendous campaign of the government and armed forces of Israel in Gaza cannot be allowed to make being Jewish a source of shame.” He proceeded to berate Israel for allegedly making “life for Jews who live outside Israel and have no responsibility for the decisions its government takes, so very much harder,” before concluding: “And so I sit here with my terrific salt beef sandwich and my chocolate mousse, indulging that bit of my Jewish identity which makes sense to me. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”
It’s nearly impossible to imagine Rayner, or any other food critic, mentioning the persecution of the Uyghur minority by the Beijing regime in a review of a Chinese restaurant or asserting that a reviewer of Chinese origin is obliged to invoke this crisis of conscience in a discussion of Peking duck. Not so with Jewish cuisine, especially when some Jewish writers are all too willing to join in the chorus of opprobrium. One has to ask, if a Jewish restaurant was serving Sephardic staples like kubbeh or chicken with couscous, instead of Ashkenazi ones like chopped liver or latkes, would a review of that establishment contain a barb about how these dishes have been appropriated by the Jewish colonizers from the Arabs, without mentioning the long, largely unhappy sojourn of Jewish communities in Arab countries? If so, it’s safe to say that none of the editors would bat an eyelid upon receiving such copy.
I am not, of course, asking for sympathy now that my media escape routes have been closed down; there are far more pressing matters of life and death to worry about. My point is that if we have really reached a juncture where a discussion of eating out necessitates critical mention of Israel but no other country—a trend likely to worsen following the tragic deaths of seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers in Gaza last week—it’s further proof that the Palestinian issue dominates the Western conscience more than any other. And because of its naked one-sidedness, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
The post A Bad Taste in the Mouth first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Dreaded Moment Is Finally Here
A drone view shows Palestinians and terrorists gathering around Red Cross vehicles on the day Hamas hands over the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, seized during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
JNS.org – The moment we had all been dreading came to pass on Feb. 20, as four coffins draped with Israeli flags traveled from the Gaza Strip to Israel in a convoy led by the Israel Defense Forces. Two of the caskets were markedly smaller, in a heartbreaking confirmation that Ariel and Kfir Bibas, the two little boys abducted to Gaza with their mother, Shiri Bibas, during the Hamas-led pogrom on Oct. 7, 2013, did not survive their ordeal.
As I was writing these words, I received a video from my youngest son, who is studying in Israel, of two rainbows etched high in the sky above Tel Aviv’s Florentin district. As I choked back tears, I wanted to believe that this spectacle—God’s tribute to these two complete innocents—was a sign of hope for the rest of us.
But then I remembered that once again, Jews are on the defensive even as we grieve for these children, whose smiling faces became emblematic of the plight of the Israeli and foreign hostages seized on that terrible day. For it is impossible to grieve peacefully without remembering the sight of posters bearing the photos of Ariel and Kfir, as well as Shiri and their father, Yarden Bibas, being violently ripped from walls and lampposts by the antisemitic Hamas cheerleaders who have poisoned our lives. It is impossible to grieve peacefully without recalling the cruel barbs about the “weaponization” of the hostages issued by insidious pundits like Mehdi Hasan, the British-born Islamist antisemite who, shockingly and inexplicably, was granted US citizenship in 2020.
Most of all, it is impossible to grieve peacefully with the memory of the grotesque ceremony staged by Hamas before the coffins carrying the four bodies set off still fresh in our minds. Jaunty Arabic music blared through loudspeakers, and children posed with the guns carried by Hamas terrorists as their parents grinned and leered for the cameras.
Many hours later, an even more shocking development was reported. Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike, as falsely claimed by Hamas, but were brutally murdered in November 2023, as was the fourth hostage, 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz, according to the autopsies on the bodies undertaken in Israel. Forensic analysis also revealed that Hamas lied about Shiri being returned since the body in the coffin was not hers. The agony persists, and we continue to cry out, “Where is Shiri Bibas?”
The giant screen at the ceremony mocked Shiri and her children even in death—their images dwarfed by a vile, crude caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire, his fangs dripping with blood. Don’t be fooled by the apologists who will tell you that this representation of Netanyahu is merely trenchant criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza—a war that only erupted because of the monstrous atrocities of Oct. 7. It is better understood as a symbol of the sickness enveloping Palestinian society, which regards Jews as subhuman, and which liberally borrows from 2,000 years of anti-Jewish iconography to make that point.
The depiction of Netanyahu as a vampire is no accident, just as images of him dressed in a Nazi uniform are no accident. The Palestinians and their admirers are expert at selecting images that recycle the worst canards about Jews: that they have eagerly adopted the methods and ideology of their worst persecutors and that their collective goal is to suck out the lifeblood of non-Jews without mercy—to the point of sacrificing their own people should that turn out to be necessary, with the Bibas family on display as Exhibit “A.”
The association of Jews with blood dates back at least to the Roman era, spawning anti-Jewish “Blood Libel” riots from Norwich in England (one of the earliest examples) to Damascus in Syria (one of the more recent.) It has been embraced by both Christian and Islamic theologians, as well as by the more secular antisemites who asserted their hatred of Jews in the language of science rather than religion. In the literature and journals of the 19th and 20th centuries, the fictitious figure of the vampire emerged with unmistakable Jewish associations.
“It’s impossible to have this discussion without bringing up the blood libel, the unsubstantiated claim that Jews murdered gentile children to use their blood in rituals,” wrote Isabella Reish in a recent essay on the 1922 film Nosferatu. “Thus, European vampires of old are intrinsically linked to Jewishness.” In my view, that linkage is as true of Hamas now as it is of a Berlin salon in the dark years that ushered in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
We cannot live with this hatred, which has seeped from the Palestinians into the wider world, especially among Muslim communities in North America, Europe and Australia—nor should we be expected to. Combating it effectively means that we must be honest about the sources of the problem.
The main source is the Palestinians themselves. All the current discussions about the reconstruction of Gaza and the possible relocation of its civilian population miss the bigger issue. If Palestinians are to live successful, productive lives, then their society must be thoroughly deradicalized, foremost by challenging the antisemitic hatred that has consumed them. The United States, in particular, must prioritize the complete transformation of the Palestinian school system, installing and supervising a curriculum that will educate Palestinian children about Jewish history and religion, about the abiding, uninterrupted Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, and about the cynical manner their own plight has been exploited by Arab leaders happy to project internal unrest onto an external, “colonialist” enemy.
The second source is harder to pin down and cannot be dealt with in a school environment. I’m talking about the fans of the Scottish soccer club Glasgow Celtic, who waved banners urging “Show Zionism the Red Card” at a match in, of all places, the German city of Munich; about the Muslim and far-left vigilantes who last week descended on one of America’s most Jewish neighborhood, Borough Park in Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were gratifyingly confronted by local resistance; about the cowardly arsonists burning down synagogues and Jewish day-care centers in Canada and Australia. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to do more than just respond to each outrage. What’s required is a comprehensive global strategy aimed at rooting out these organizations, their communications networks and their propaganda outlets. No measures, including deportation and loss of naturalized citizenship, should be off the table, and no country—looking at you two, Qatar and Iran—should escape scrutiny for fueling these fires.
For decades, our elected leaders have cynically used Holocaust commemoration and education as evidence of their commitment to fighting post-Hitler antisemitism. That hasn’t worked very well, and as the black-and-white images of the Holocaust fade into history’s depths, replaced by decontextualized social-media video bursts of Gazans fleeing Israeli bombing, it’ll work even less so. If the soul-crushing pictures of the coffins bearing the Bibas children don’t result in a fundamental strategic pivot, then perhaps nothing will.
The post The Dreaded Moment Is Finally Here first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Is Religion Rational?
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – When it comes to religion, how much is belief, and how much is rational? Is Judaism a rational religion? Does being religious require a leap of faith?
Perhaps other faiths do. I mean, I respect everyone’s right to choose the religion they subscribe to and want to practice, but some religions do require extraordinary leaps of faith from their followers.
Judaism, on the other hand, is based not on any incredulous leaps of faith, but on the shared firsthand experience of an entire nation.
With other faiths, the starting point is a supposed revelation reported to have been experienced by the founder of that faith. You either believe it or you don’t believe it. Your choice.
But Judaism was founded at Mount Sinai where millions of Israelites, fresh out of Egypt, experienced the Revelation at Sinai. Each and every Israelite, personally, heard the Ten Commandments from the voice of God, not Moses! And it wasn’t virtual, it was personal. They were all there, and it was an in-body experience.
That’s not faith. That is fact. Not only Moses and his disciples but the entire nation of men, women and children—a few million in all—were eyewitnesses to that revelation. And this was handed down by father to son, mother to daughter, throughout the generations wherever Jews lived. European Jews and Yemenite Jews have the very same tradition, the very same Torah. Yes, there are differences in custom and variations on a theme, but the basic traditions are identical.
How? Because they all came from the very same source—Almighty God at Mount Sinai!
This week, we read Mishpatim, a Torah portion that deals with civil and social laws that are very logical. Everyone understands and accepts that society needs a code of law and justice to be able to function.
So, if your ox gores your friend’s ox, you will be liable for damages. If you’re making a barbecue and your negligence causes the fire to spread to your neighbor’s property and it burns down his house, you will be liable. And if you’re going on vacation and deposit your pet poodle at the Lords & Ladies Poodle Parlor for safe keeping and when you come back, they tell you they lost your poodle, then they will be responsible for paying you for your poodle. And so on.
But even the logical mitzvot have much more to them than meets the eye. There are layers and layers of depth, meaning, symbolism and profound spirituality behind every single mitzvah, rational or not.
There are only a handful of chukim, statutory decrees that we were not given an explanation of and for which we must take on faith, like kashrut or shatnez, the law of not mixing wool and linen garments together.
But the truth is that every mitzvah needs faith.
Why? Because without faith, we do something only humans are capable of. Do you know what that is? Rationalization.
Everyone understands that you’re not supposed to steal. And yet, studies have shown that no less than 59% of hotel guests steal from their hotel rooms. Now, I don’t think the hotel really minds if you take the shampoo. I imagine if you asked them, they would say it’s fine.
But no hotel will let you take the towels or the robes. And no hotel will let you take the TV. I was shocked to read that some guests even took home a mattress! (Apparently, in the middle of the night, they snuck it into the elevator, went down to the basement garage and stuffed it into the trunk of their car.)
If you ask these people, they will likely give you all kinds of reasons why their actions are justified. The hotel overcharged me. It calculates shrinkage into their price, so I actually paid for it. If I wear the hotel’s towel on the beach, I am advertising for them, so they should pay me.
This is classic rationalization.
So we do need faith after all, even for logical commandments like not stealing. Otherwise, we fail. Badly.
Interestingly, the very same Torah reading of Mishpatim, with its logical, civil laws also has the famous phrase, Na’aseh V’Nishma. These were the words of the Jewish people when asked if they would accept God’s Torah. They replied Na’aseh, “we will do” and only thereafter Nishmah, “we will listen” and understand. It is the core of simple, pure, absolute faith, beyond any logic or understanding.
And this explains why the Ten Commandments, which we read last week, begin with Anochi, “I am God,” the lofty, abstract mitzvah to believe in God. To have faith.
And then the other commandments go on to tell us the most basic laws that every low life knows he should keep. Not to murder, commit adultery, steal, lie or be jealous.
How did we get from the highest, metaphysical commandment of belief to the grossest of the gross in a few short sentences?
Because without faith, a human being is capable of justifying anything.
The accursed Nazis justified the Holocaust. REAL genocide, not make-believe South African genocide. How did they justify it? By saying Jews are scum, sub-human. We are doing the world a service by eliminating them. The world will be a better place for it. Rationalization.
Without the first commandment of faith in God, there can be no adherence to any of the other commandments.
Logic gets you pretty far but not far enough. As logical as Judaism may be, we still need the foundation of faith to do what we must do and avoid that which is tempting but wrong.
May we all embrace Judaism with knowledge and reason and by understanding its philosophy, without losing that pure and simple faith that every one of us possesses.
The post Is Religion Rational? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli Security Control of Gaza Is an Existential Necessity
Orthodox Jewish men stand near a tank, ahead of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as seen from the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
JNS.org – Thursday was a national day of mourning, as the bodies of hostage Shiri Bibas’s children Ariel and Kfir, along with that of Oded Lipshitz, returned to Israel. Hamas also handed over a fourth coffin, falsely saying it held Shiri Bibas‘s remains, but it was subsequently determined that it contained the corpse of an unidentified non-Israeli woman.
Their dire fate, along with that of some 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, stand as an unbearable reminder of the consequences of allowing a genocidal, jihadist army to entrench itself on Israel’s border.
The sorrow that grips all Israelis, reinforced by months of war, adds up to a clear national imperative: Israel can never again allow Gaza to be a staging ground for an Iranian-backed terrorist army. Once Israel has exhausted all efforts to secure the release of its hostages, Hamas must be eliminated from the face of the Earth as a terror army. No one on Israel’s borders can be allowed to build an ability to send death squads and invasion brigades over the border in an organized manner.
Ensuring Israeli security control over Gaza is the only way to achieve this. This work cannot be outsourced to anyone; the idea that a foreign force or paid mercenaries would have the ability to deal with Hamas is absurd. Israeli security control of Gaza is not just a military necessity to prevent future Hamas barbarity, it is an existential imperative.
The ongoing professional inquiries by the IDF into the events of Oct. 7 aim to provide answers to the public, the bereaved families and affected communities about the multiple system failures of that darkest of days.
But these investigations are not just about accountability—they are about learning from history in real time. As one IDF official put it this week, Israel must “carry out the lessons learned during the war, not afterward, and prepare for future conflicts.”
The scope of the IDF’s inquiries is broad, covering four main areas: Israel’s long-term strategy regarding Gaza, intelligence failures leading up to the war, the decision-making process between Oct. 6 and 7, and the first 72 hours of defensive operations.
But even before their conclusions are published, likely in the coming days, it is possible to draw some key conclusions.
Not deterred, not a rational actor, not seeking prosperity
Before the attack, every day that Israel did not act to prevent Hamas from building its capabilities, and every day that Israel gave up on the idea of achieving security control over Gaza, was an opportunity for Hamas to develop further its murderous plans and prepare for the massacre.
The Western-oriented idea that Israel could afford to refrain from continuous security operations in Gaza, and that the IDF could stay back behind the border, was fueled by deluded concepts of Hamas being deterred, that it was a rational actor, and that it sought economic prosperity.
These delusions stem from a catastrophic inability to grasp the jihadist mindset of a fundamentalist Islamic death cult, and from the tendency that was rampant in the defense establishment and the political echelon before Oct. 7 to project Western thinking onto our enemies. This allowed Hamas the space and the time to prepare its attack. Those who wish to indefinitely delay Israeli operations to prevent Hamas from rebuilding these capabilities have returned to the pre-Oct. 7 misconceptions. The “day after” is today.
During the Oct. 7 attacks, Hamas behaved like an army intent on genocide. It seized land, executing civilians in the most brutal manner imaginable, and taking hostages to act as insurance policies for the survival of its leadership. It was only able to do these things because it controlled its own territory, giving it the ability to develop an arms industry, smuggle in weapons and develop its intentions with minimal interference.
Meanwhile, the chief of the IDF General Staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, who is due to step down on March 6, has spent recent days in the United States discussing strategic and operational issues with top American military officials.
Halevi visited the Pentagon to meet with Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with staff officers, and with Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the commander of CENTCOM (responsible for the Middle East), to discuss Lebanon and Iran, and ways to strengthen U.S.-Israeli cooperation.
But Gaza trumped the other arenas. Halevi expedited his return to Israel due to the agreement to return the bodies of the hostages.
No international diplomacy or security guarantees can obviate the necessity of full Israeli freedom of operation in Gaza for the foreseeable future. Failure to recognize this would invite, once again, catastrophe, and Israel cannot afford to repeat its mistakes.
The post Israeli Security Control of Gaza Is an Existential Necessity first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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