December 31, 2021 “A swarm of wild beasts came” Va’eira 8:20
The January 6 terrorists were puppets, cultivated by Trump, the Republican elite through Fox News, its TV proxy, and its relentless social media machine. The 2022 Congressional election will bear tens of thousands of these armed, zealous, and hyped-up dupes. American Brown Shirts? Germany 1933? Pray for democracy.
December 23, 2021 “Get back to work” Shemot 5:4
Child-care frees parents to work. Pre-K education builds future work force. Alternate power fuels an industry now dominated by China and Germany. Home Care keeps seniors out of nursing homes. Funding IRS and making billionaires pay taxes is a no-brainer. To Joe Manchin and Republicans: Rejecting Build Back Better costs more than passing it!
December 17, 2021 “Proverbs 28:15 – Like a roaring lion is a ruler over poor people”
The White rulers of Texas now force a poor, raped Black woman to bear the rapist’s child and without health insurance, childcare nor pre-school, just like the children their slave-master forbears harvested from the black women they raped and held prisoner. “Pro-life” is really just pro-birth. It ignores and scorns supporting all mothers and all children in our society.
December 10, 2021 “Let not your anger flare” Vayegash 44:18
Most non-vaxxers are the dupes of anti-vaxxers, many of whose social media posts and websites compare mask and vaccination mandates with Nuremburg laws, a sad marginalization of the Holocaust. Worse are descriptions of COVID as a Jewish conspiracy. The anti-vaxx movement brims with antisemitism
December 3, 2021 “You have done evil” Mikeitz 44:5
Voting restrictions, laws dictating women’s health choices, ceaseless promotion of guns, anti-demonstration mandates, meddling in school curricula and even business economic threats requiring anti-BDS pledges all recall the “benign” initial steps of authoritarianism. History teaches this isn’t good for Jews.
November 26, 2021 “Would you reign over us?” Vayeshev 37:8
General Flynn’s demand for “one nation, one religion” is a peek under the lid of the Right’s deeply held, but rarely confessed anti-Semitism. Their pro-Israel gestures are designed to leverage Jewish influence and money, but their ascendance is as bad for Jews as for every other minority.
November 19, 2021 “Rescue me from my brother” Vayishlach 32:12
“Cancel Culture”, “anti-White discrimination”, and “critical race theory” are devices the Right seizes upon to insert its devotees onto college and public school boards, village councils, and church committees for opposing social justice, radically laundering curricula and reading options, and promoting creationism.
November 12, 2021 “I am able to harm you” Vayetzei 31:29
Naftali Bennett hasn’t changed his colors, but his strategy to empower the Palestinian Authority and strengthen schools and services for Palestinian and Israeli Arab communities demonstrates wise governance and thwarts Hamas’ aspirations: Leadership, not mercenary politics.
November 5, 2021 “we can be fruitful in the land” Toldos 26:22
Paid child care permits poor mothers the dignity of work. Universal pre-school develops educated children. Free community college gives our young adults a competitive edge. Ultimately, these negative-net-cost programs are desperately needed for our economy to thrive and compete.
October 29, 2021 ”Bury your dead” Chayei Sarah 23:15
Gerrymandering, preposterous election audits, engineered recall campaigns, partisan election laws and the determination to blink at the January 6 terrorism are all calculated attacks on democracy by despots bedazzled by power.
October 22, 2021 “They struck them blindness” Vayeira 19:11
Ohio and other Red-State legislatures, using “Critical Race Theory” as pretext, are enacting laws to prevent teaching about racism and slavery and to erase crucial segments of American social history from school curricula. This, of course, has an fitting precedent: Holocaust denial.
October 15, 2021 “Take yourself to the land I show you” Lech Lecha 12:1
Six years after we abandoned the SS St. Louis refugees to Nazi clutches, Truman welcomed 140,000 survivors. Congress, since 1970, has admitted 200,000 Soviet Jews. Both were compassionate exceptions to immigration restrictions passed initially to exclude Jews. Our community must insist on enacting a humane, practical, and comprehensive immigration system.
October 8, 2021 ” Remember the everlasting covenant” Noah 9:16
Our sages reconstrued the Torah to avert capital punishment, supplant the priestly service, and be accessible to a diverse Jewish diaspora. Supreme Court justices who slavishly adhere to the Constitution as first drafted favoring the proprietor elite, contentious federalism and racial hierarchy sadly lack the wisdom that ennobled Jewish law.
October 1, 2021 “Now the serpent was cunning ” Bereishis 3:1
Texas gets the heat, but Ohio Republicans just passed curbs on student masking, gratuitous new voting restrictions, barriers to sex education other than abstinence-only, and impediments to women’s health services; and now propose a partisan redistricting map illegally assuring their supermajority.
September 24, 2021 “one who tempts me to sin…” Succot Liturgy
Red State politicians and conservative media, manipulating their naïve Republican base for partisan reward, killed and sickened thousands of adults and children by corruptly portraying masking and vaccine resistance as a declaration of personal freedom.
September 10, 2021 “You will surely act corruptly” Vayalech 31:29
Women with unwanted pregnancies condemned by imperious politicians to state-imposed childbearing or backroom abortions. Feigning election fraud, the same culprits impose partisan election laws. The degradation of conservatism is a moment of reflection for Jewish Republicans.
September 3, 2021 “Return to the Lord your God with all your heart and soul” Nizavim 30:2
A Happy New Year to ALL – filled with sweetness and health, a year of tolerance, justice, compassion, and community. L’Shana Tova!
August 27, 2021 “Accursed is he who leads the blind astray” Ki Savo 27:18
Typical non-vaxxers are the result of the weaponization of their credulousness by a libertarian fringe, by the Right, and by the radical Left. It is a subversive leveraging of naivety as a human frailty by a cult of cynics bent on conceit and indifferent to suffering.
August 20, 2021 “When you go to war against your enemies” Ki Teitzeh 21:10
Our retreat from Afghanistan’s failed military and government is a surrender to militant Islam that is dangerous for America and for Israel. Like the Iraqi adventure, the Afghan war lacked vision and purpose and was, therefore, doomed at the outset, but a new Islamic republic is a chilling reality.
August 13, 2021 “You shall not pervert judgement” Shoftim 16:19
Tucker Carlson’s glorification this week of Hungarian dictator Victor Orban whose whitewashing of Hungarian Nazi collaboration, use of anti-Semitic tropes to vilify his enemies, and xenophobia arouse fear for 100,000 remaining Jewish Hungarians speaks volumes about how the Fox puppet masters view Jews and regard democracy.
August 6, 2021 “To your heart’s desire you may eat” Re’eh 12:20
The Ben and Jerry controversy shouldn’t be its opposition to Israeli West Bank occupation. It should be only about its deceptive negligence to condemn Russia, India, Ethiopia, China, Myanmar and other regimes directing much more repressive occupations and humiliations. No dessert for Ben and Jerry.
July 30, 2021 “Love the stranger because you were one in Egypt” Eikev 10:19
Preserving DACA protections resonates powerfully with Jews. Consider those denied immigration who died in the Holocaust, the miraculous resettlement here of survivors, and the Jewish migration from the U.S.S.R. Let’s make room in our hearts and find space in our country for these young aspiring Americans.
July 23, 2021 “You shall not bear false witness” Va’eschanan 5:17
The Republican war on public health is unrelenting. Trolling CDC leadership, abetting anti-vax trolls, passing laws to thwart masking, vaccine advocacy, and public health norms, impeding women’s health providers, and banning Medicaid expansion, their strategy is to incite their base despite the toll in lives lost.
July 16, 2021 “He shall wage war for you” Devarim 3:22
Killer Putin? President Biden is standing up to a vile tinhorn dictator whose murderous ambitions in the Artic, Syria and Ukraine, whose environmental outrages, whose repressive governance, and whose hostile sabotage and looting of our digital networks have left millions as refugees and murdered and dangerously harmed our national institutions.
July 9, 2021 “If a man swears an oath, he shall not desecrate his word” Matos 30:3
Certainly skeptical that recent hundreds of voting laws were enacted for election security, the Trump Supreme Court has nevertheless abandoned the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Not, however, for Constitutional reasons; it merely re-construed the Act as in comport with the devices of Red State legislators hell-bent on voter suppression.
July 2, 2021 “Surely you shall give them a portion Pinchas” 27:6
Nearly 100 years ago, a pitiless world spurned Jews seeking safety from cruelties and deportations inflicted by Germany and its accomplices. Today, ignoring the horrors of the Northern Triangle, Syria, and north Africa, we again treat desperate victims as mere freeloaders and interlopers. Shame!
June 25, 2021 “To curse my enemies did I summon you” Balak 24:10
Republican schemers and their Fox stooges addict their base to invented wedge issues: Immigrants, critical race theory, taking our guns, cancel culture, killing unborn children, rampant crime, etc. Thus, through deception does the right prosper to serve its donors and corporate patrons.
June 18, 2021 “We shall not veer right or left. Chukas” 20:17
Is it fair to hold Israel to a higher standard than Hamas? Than Fatah? A higher standard than Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Iran or Russia? For that matter, than the U.S.? Whether as “Start-up Nation” or “People of the Book”, our history and our nationhood, socially, politically, and strategically, are a testament to a higher standard.
June 11, 2021 “The plague had begun among the people” Korach 17:12
For pro-Israel advocates, when Israelis target Arab neighborhoods with evictions and house confiscations and respond to Hamas rockets so disproportionally that hundreds are left homeless, maimed and killed, how are we to defend what’s become of Zionism to compassionate people whom these things disgust?
June 4, 2021 “They brought forth an evil report on the land” Shelach 13:32
As Jews struggled to assimilate in America, their aspirations aligned with those of African-Americans. Many now fully-assimilated Jews, ever yet mindful of antisemitism, have turned cynical to public education, to programs for alleviating poverty, and to the adversity faced by less sanguine minorities. Way too much assimilation.
May 28, 2021 “The rabble that was among them…” Behaaloscha 11:4
An educated community that permits itself to be duped into preferring potential COVID infection to immunization intersects neatly with the Stop-the-Steal lunatics and the anti-Semitic Alt-Right. They’re not Woke. They’re asleep.
May 21, 2021 “bitter water that causes a wasting away” Nasso 5:18
The biggest obstacle to Palestinian aspirations is not the Israeli right nor settlers nor politicians. It is Hamas, a Mafia that diverts precious international aid to terrorism, suppresses civil rights and foments belligerence. The entire region suffers a drought in water and leadership.
May 14, 2021 “There shall be no wrath upon the Children of Israel” Bamidbar 1:53
Confiscation of Palestinians’ homes may be Bibi’s political strategy, but it’s an illegal, cruel, and dangerous provocation that legitimizes the contempt of Israel’s enemies and endangers her standing as a lawful democracy.
May 7, 2021 “Observe my ordinances and perform them” Behar 25:18
How is it that when contemptable politicians in both Israel and the U.S.A. spurn public safety and public health policy they are still adored even by those mourning their trampled or COVID-slain loved ones.
April 30, 2021 “Do not desecrate My holy Name” Emor 22:2
Red state legislatures that have recklessly curtailed voting rights, obstructed women’s health services, curbed gender expression, and inflated gun culture, are now, in 24 states, restricting Freedom of Assembly. The silence of Jewish Republican voices is tragic.
April 23, 2021 “Love the stranger amongst you for you were strangers in Egypt ” Kedoshim 19:34
Children at our border, refugees from ruthlessness and violence, are a humanitarian crisis. Distilling it as an immigration problem is a crude, dishonest political device. Jews should best understand this. Indifference to social disintegration in the Northern Triangle will only intensify the immigrant surge.
April 16, 2021 “He is to call out: Contaminated, Contaminated” Tazria 13:45
Elites of the Right obsess over “socialism”, “cancel culture”, and corporate tax rates, but ignore real crises such as poverty, health care inequity, and social injustice, in utter contempt of their own working class and rural base.
April 9, 2021 “Distinguish between the contaminated and the pure” Shemini 11:47
By welcoming the Kahanist racist “Religious Zionist Party” (it’s newly laundered name) into his government, Bibi benightedly justifies those slandering Israel as Apartheid and he mocks every Jewish survivor of marginalization and expulsion.
April 2nd, 2021 “The Israelites left Egypt armed” Exodus 13:18
The vulgar deification of unfettered gun ownership, devised by the NRA, gun manufacturers, and the politicians they coerce, is another example of the right weaponizing naivety, fear, and bitterness to incite proselytes.
March 26, 2021 “All who are needy, let them come” Passover Haggadah: Magid
Jewish Cleveland has donated $17 million in emergency funds so the Federation could defray COVID-19 related costs for day schools and agencies. Community begins and ends with compassion, the bread of redemption. Happy Passover!
March 19, 2021 ” If the entire community is oblivious and errs…” Vayikra 4:13
Half of male Republicans reported as unsure or unwilling to take a COVID vaccine. Sadly, those whose thinking is informed by Fox News hosts and whose social media feeds are curated to reinforce their political bias have little fuel for prudent, independent thought.
March 12, 2021 “The Children of Israel freely contributed ” Vayakhel 35:29
Republicans who, in 2017, granted no strings 40% tax reductions to corporations and a $4.4 million tax cut for $20M+ estates, are now clamoring, in Ohio (SB 17) and other states, to impose new restrictions on food stamp recipients. Welfare for the rich and spiteful enmity for the poor.
March 5, 2021 “Your people have become corrupt” Ki Sisa 32:7
Republicans, noting suppression in Hong Kong and Myanmar, are salivating. In 17 gerrymandered states their legislative monopolies have suddenly introduced over 100 laws reducing access to the ballot to ensure their own immunity from election accountability. The Party of Lincoln despoiling democracy.
February 26, 2021 “You shall cause them to go up in smoke” Tetzaveh 29:13
Cancelling drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; blocking Keystone and tar sands toxic oil extraction; reinstating E.P.A. enforcement; replacing cabinet-member lobbyists with dedicated public servants. Policies that sustain our children’s environment and create cutting-edge employment. Now, that’s a breath of fresh air.
February 19, 2021 “I sinned, for I feared the people” I Samuel 15:24
The Likud embrace of Kahanists is an accommodation to racism and expulsion. A desperate Netanyahu betrays the Zionist ideal, making it odious to those of good will.
February 12, 2021 “…a servant shall work for six years” Mishpatim 21:2
Reduced to a social service agency, the AFL-CIO remains an effective and compassionate advocate for workers. The Right’s demonization of organized labor, weaponized 40 years ago under Reagan, has been embraced, ironically, by a Jewish community that created organized labor and by so many people whose parents it rescued from exploitation.
February 5, 2021 “Gods of gold you shall not make” Yisro 20:20
The rabble that left Egypt coalesced around a compassionate legal code and faith in God. The new administration seeks to unify us around legal measures grounded in compassion – support for the needy, funding exhausted state and municipal services, initial steps to prudent immigration policy, organized responses to pandemic – and in repudiation of demigods.
January 22, 2021 “I have made the hearts of his servants stubborn” Bo 10:1
The Capitol takeover exposed another fabrication of the Right: That the right to bear weapons should have no constraints. Assault weapons and high-capacity pistol magazines WILL be brandished for political advantage and to threaten civil society. Second Amendment fanaticism serves no real purpose but to accessorize violent dissension.
January 15, 2021 “I shall incite against you a swarm of wild beasts” Va’eira 8:17
In 1859 Democrats declared that John Brown’s Harpers Ferry outrage exemplified Republican abolitionists. Abraham Lincoln responded, “John Brown is not a Republican.” Similarly, Donald Trump and his boot-lickers (McConnell, Cruz, Jordan…) are insurrectionists, not Republicans. Republicans need a new Lincoln, not more bottom-feeders.
January 8, 2021 “Come, let us outsmart the people” Shemot 1:10
Does permitting the U.S. to arm the Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabian with F-35 Stealth fighter jets benefit Israel or does it benefit Israel’s prime minister? Is Arab despots’ recognition worth risking Israel’s qualitative military advantage? Better to reach across the Green Line for a truly historic and meaningful peace.
January 1, 2021 “and I will bless them” Vayechi 48:92020
This has been a strange and challenging time, a year of tragedy, antagonism, mismanagement, and isolation. Now we know that in 2021 we will emerge from the pandemic menace. May this be a new year for justice, civil discourse, equality, and generosity – a year of blessing for all of us.