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Jun 18, 2026, 11:44 PM

The Answer is Nothing

The question: What would it take for me to stop supporting Israel? Question There’s a question that follows every Jew who defends Israel, whether anyone says it to your face or not: “What would it take for you to stop?” Not soften,...

Jun 18, 2026, 11:26 PM

Understanding the Source Matters

A friend sent me a short video clip last week, the kind that circulates quickly in group chats and gets forwarded with a single line: “You need to see this.” It walked through, in a few minutes, something most...

Jun 18, 2026, 10:32 PM

Confronting The Snake

It takes us just a week to read a story that spans almost forty years. Punished for ingratitude and lack of faith, the Jews were forced to wander in the wilderness. Parashat Chukat describes thirty-eight years of those travels....

Jun 18, 2026, 1:39 PM

The Words We Surrender

Words disappear—or get redefined—when their defenders retreat. Image © Ivan Bassov, 2026. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Why Every Surrendered Word Makes the Next Surrender Easier Battles are fought not only with weapons, laws, and diplomacy. They are also fought with words. Sometimes we lose those battles before we even realize they are taking place. Consider the vocabulary used...

Jun 17, 2026, 9:04 PM

Teaching Our Children in Unsteady Times

There are moments when children ask questions much larger than the words they use. It may be something they heard in school, saw online, or overheard between adults. A headline may have reached them before we had the chance to...

Jun 17, 2026, 5:48 AM

Whose Life Is It Anyway? Why We Are Still Fighting

Image courtesy of Hadassah.

As I follow what is happening to women today, I recall one passionate high-school history lesson describing how hard women were forced to fight for the right to vote. It took decades of conflict before the 19th Amendment, prohibiting...

Deborah Villanueva

Jun 17, 2026, 5:34 AM

Healing a Nation: What Hadassah Means to Israel’s Body and Soul

Photo of the author courtesy of the author.

There are moments in Israel when the line between emergency medicine and emotional survival disappears. You see it in hospital hallways. You hear it in the voices of teenagers carrying grief too large for their age. You feel it in...

Barry Mellinger

Jun 16, 2026, 5:44 AM

Our Eternal Love

Mike Leven knows the answer. He published it in eJewish Philanthropy on June 3rd, calm and confident and almost entirely without alarm. Tamim Academy schools work. The data is unambiguous. The economics are scalable. Eighty schools for fifty million...

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

Jun 15, 2026, 4:15 AM

The De-escalation Trap

The De-escalation Trap When peace does not remove danger, but transfers it. A ceasefire can be a moral achievement. It can also be a technology for moving danger from one body to another. This is the uncomfortable distinction hidden inside much...

Eliezer Avraham

Jun 14, 2026, 5:28 PM

America 250 | Essay 4: From Ellis Island to the American Dream

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A journey of hope and reinvention as families crossed an ocean with faith and determination, weaving Jewish resilience into the American fabric. From Exile to Arrival They came with little more than hope. Between 1880 and 1924, nearly two million Jews...

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