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Since time immemorial, enemies of the Jewish people depended on treacherous voices within the Jewish community to validate their hatred towards Judaism, and in recent generations, the rights of Jewish people not only to practice their religion, but also to live as equals among citizens and build their own country.

The Jewish people have always struggled with our propensity to disagree. In the diaspora, this propensity is recorded in the Talmud, which presents endless arguments concerning the “right way to live following Torah values.” As a stateless people for nearly 2,000 years, our ability to debate, analyze, and reason served us and our religion by keeping the Torah alive. Constant reevaluation and, in some cases, new insights (chidushim) kept Judaism alive and relevant to every generation. The fact that in 2025 observant Jews quote the Rambam, the Ramban, Rashi, the Vilna Gaon, and Rav Soloveitchik — commentators who lived one to two millennia after the revelation at Mount Sinai — attests to the vitality and continuing evolution of the Jewish people and its religion.

Nation’s Largest Teachers’ Union Embraces Anti-Zionist Curriculum

The National Education Association (NEA), America’s largest teachers’ union, representing nearly three million educators, voted at its Representative Assembly in Portland, Oregon, to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a civil rights organization long known for combating antisemitism and providing educational resources on the Holocaust and bias in schools.

There has been a persistent lie amongst the Jew-hating population that their loathing of the Jewish nation is limited only to the Jewish state and not the Jewish people. In other words, they are anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. This has always been a ridiculous notion, proven false time and time again, yet with the ongoing war in Gaza and the lies spread about the state of the civilian population there, the mask of anti-Zionism is harder to keep on. The surge in antisemitic incidents, particularly in the past two weeks, underscores how anti-Zionist rhetoric fuels real-world violence and discrimination against Jews, blurring any supposed boundary between the two.

Compared to the familiar t’hilim, Shema, and Amidah of daily prayers, it can be difficult to keep up with selichos and kinos, which are read only on fasting days, often quickly and without announcing the page. To feel the spirit of Tishah b’Av, I usually take a history book to shul that relates to the first Jewish uprising against the Romans that resulted in the destruction of Yerushalayim and centuries of exile for most Jews.

As long as there have been wars, official images of heroism stood in contrast to depictions of suffering. In many cases, the latter had a tremendous impact in shaping public opinion. Who can forget Eddie Adams’ 1968 photo of a South Vietnamese police captain executing a Vietcong agent in broad daylight on a street in Saigon? Likewise, Nick Ut’s 1972 photo of a Vietnamese girl fleeing from a napalm bombing in which the South Vietnamese air force accidentally bombed a village. Both photographers received the Pulitzer Prize for these images, which contributed to the rising public opposition to the American role in that war.