Gary Rosenblatt
NEW YORK — Can you handle some positive news about dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians? Like many of us, I suspect, I tend to discount reports of progress on the Mideast peace front as naïv...
NEW YORK — This week brought another political and diplomatic disaster for Israel — further proof that Jerusalem must change dramatically its hasbara efforts, not just to persevere but perhaps even...
NEW YORK — While traditional Jews here and around the world will mark Shavuot (from the evening of May 18 to sundown May 20) by staying up the first night studying Torah, several thousand young men...
NEW YORK — For the longest time, Jewish peoplehood was lived rather than discussed. But no longer. Ever since the Israelites fled Egypt and crossed the Red Sea in miraculous fashion — a seminal ac...
NEW YORK — Remember “The Poseidon Adventure,” the melodramatic 1972 film about a group of desperate passengers aboard an aging, ill-fated luxury liner about to sink? The long-forgotten plot of the...
NEW YORK — Not surprisingly, as the economic downturn drags on, there is much communal discussion about the need for more and more funding to keep our most precious institutions and programs intact...
NEW YORK — A self-professed atheist, Michael Steinhardt might be offended — or else amused — to be described as a modern-day prophet. It’s not that the businessman-turned-philanthropist preaches r...
NEW YORK — A report has been commissioned by the national policy-making body on Jewish community relations to study the relationship between and among the top national defense agencies — including ...
Is there is a common thread to — and lesson to be learned from — Israel’s agonizing efforts to obtain the release of Gilad Shalit, its ongoing crisis in dealing with the Palestinians, and President...
NEW YORK — Remember Y2K? Ten years ago this week, on the eve of a new year, a new decade and a new millennium, there were daily headlines everywhere predicting various forces of doom on the horizon...
A sobering statistic: Israel has averaged a war every eight years since statehood. With that in mind, and with the memory of frightened civilians in the north left on their own while under rocket ...
(Editor’s note: This column first appeared April 28, 2000.) Did you hear the one about the fellow on his first UJA mission to Israel who asked his guide, “How do you say tikkun olam in Hebrew?” T...
The only thing surprising about the decision last week of a distinguished Ivy League university press to, in effect, censor a key element of a book about censorship is how predictable the result wa...
It didn’t take long for the jokes to start making the rounds in response to the latest rabbis-as-(alleged)-crooks scandal. There was the one about the latest Friday-night practical halacha shiur, o...
The contrast between the American spectacle of celebrity death worship and the Jewish tradition of mourning has rarely been as sharply defined as recently. I write these words shortly after Michae...
Accustomed as he is to public speaking here and around the country, David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, can read an audience as well as anyone. Lately, he says, h...
NEW YORK — Think of the American Jewish community as a business — a more than $10 billion annual business. If our organizations and leaders made programming decisions based on that notion, perhaps ...
Have we reached the point where we not only take anti-Semitism for granted but don’t even question the illogical attitudes of those who hate us? I learned with shock, as we all did, of the attempt...

