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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.

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.

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.

(July 7, 2025 / JNS) The New York Times committed an act of journalism recently, and many of its readers—and its staff—lost their minds. It reported the fact that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s candidate for mayor of New York City, whose campaign successfully pitched him to the public as the Muslim-American and Indian-American candidate, had claimed to be an “African-American” on one of his college applications.

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.

The victory by the Israel Defense Forces over the despotic Ayatollah-led regime in Iran should be a cause of overwhelming pride and joy among Jews throughout the world. Iran, since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, has been a destabilizing force in the Middle East and the instrument of death for thousands of Israelis, Americans, and Europeans. After the overthrow of the Shah, Iran could have become a beacon of light for its historic populace. Rather than choosing democracy, the Ayatollahs, led by Ruhollah Khomeini, instituted a repressive Islamic theocracy enforced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.