Opinion

You should soon receive an application for an absentee ballot for the June 23 Primary in the mail.  But don’t wait.  You can apply for an absentee ballot online right now at nycabsentee.com/absentee.  You need to enter your name exactly as it appears on the voter registration roles to access the application.  On the application, mark temporary illness or disability as the reason for requesting the absentee ballot.  Even people who are concerned that they might expose themselves to COVID-19 by going to their usual polling place on Primary Day qualify for an absentee ballot under this category.

My wife Karen and I made aliyah from New York to Ra’anana last month with 22 other new olim. In the weeks leading up to our move, we had heard the news about the virus that was coming out of China and we realized that it was likely to come to America. In fact, the first case in New York was in a community very close to where we lived.

While physical attacks on Jews have taken a pandemic pause, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent blaming of “the Jewish community” for a lapse in social distancing shows the pause does not extend to verbal assaults. Indeed, viral assaults blaming “the Jews” for COVID-19 are spiking. The dark corners of social media are filled with lurid conspiracy theories that the virus is an international Jewish bioweapon engineered so Jews can profit from poisoning the human race with toxic “vaccines.” Not only that, media across the Muslim world—including in the U.S.—accuse Israel of having created the virus to subjugate and “neuter” the world’s population, and to kill Palestinians.

While the country is shut down over the Wuhan virus plaguing the planet, the Presidential election trudges on. After Bernie Sanders quietly exited the race, former Vice President Joe Biden picked up the remaining endorsements from the holdout Democrats, including his former boss Barack Obama. More notable, however, is the first ever endorsement by the radically anti-Israel advocacy group, J Street, which endorsed Biden over President Trump last week.

Since this quarantine began, my five-year-old daughter has been asking me questions about practically everything in the universe. Why don’t fish have eyelids? Why did the Pharaoh survive the Red Sea? How are babies born? How do people die? Why is G-d invisible? Why do the letters Kof and Kuf make the same “K” sound? Why is “e” silent in the word “make”? Are tooth fairies real?

Since the end of February, most citizens in countries around the world have remained glued to their televisions. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and various local news outlets have all dominated our brainwaves. Whereas in autocratic states the news media is simply a tool of the government, in democracies the role of the news media is to provide citizens with independent and objective reporting of the facts.