With the rise in crime in and around New York City, the Queens Jewish community is growing more and more concerned with the direction the city has been taking regarding criminal justice reform and the relationship with the police. Some of these measures included ending cash bail, closing Rikers Island, and creating community jails closer to the courthouse. Councilman Rory Lancman, who represents the 24th City Council district (which covers Kew Gardens Hills, Fresh Meadows, Hillcrest, Jamaica Estates, Briarwood, and more), has been a strong advocate for much of these policy changes.

This past Sunday, a massive gathering of police supporters rallied in Crocheron Park in Bayside under the banner of Blue Lives Matter, a movement of police supporters countering the apparent political momentum for defunding and constraining the ability of police officers to arrest individuals.

This week, in a visit to Walter Reed Medical Center, President Donald Trump was photographed and videoed wearing a mask. The reaction by members of the media is just an example of a media that is no longer hiding its bias. The masks of media objectivity are off, and continuously exposing this is Trump’s best road to re-election.

This past week saw a massive surge in the defamation, desecration, and destruction of the history of the United States of America. The ire of the mob is no longer limited to protesting police brutality or Confederate statues – perhaps it never was. The goal of the far-left is to burn down the country and hope that from the ashes a better system somehow emerges. Few, if any, of our elected leaders seem to have the political will to stop them.

For some of us, summer is a carefree time. As one Jew wrote, “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.”  There’s at least one wrinkle in the enjoyment of those long summer afternoons: The spoilsport rabbis of yore gave us 22 days of semi-mourning smack dab in the middle of them.