News

Today, Sunday, as I write this, is the 28^th day of Iyar. It is a rich historical day for many reasons. Firstly, it is the day on which Yehoshua led Israel into our first battle against Amaleik. Further, in Tanach, the 28^th day of Iyar marks the day on which the Prophet Samuel, Shmuel HaNavi, departed our world. In more recent history, the 28^th day of Iyar is remembered for the day on which HaRav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Eretz Yisrael, made aliyah to then-Palestine, under British rule, and unified Jerusalem under Hebrew sovereignty, despite the very challenging situation on the ground.

Who said this horrible thing?

The Democratic representative from Michigan, Rashida Tlaib.

This is what she said:

The 2020 Presidential race is underway, with two dozen Democrats throwing their hats in the ring to oust President Trump. These contenders have hit the trail hard, with varying degrees of success attempting to separate themselves from the pack. To do so, they are taking policy positions on many issues. The media coverage, however, has been the never-ending rehashing of the 2016 election. This is because the media knows that balanced coverage of some of the key issues facing our nation is bad for 2020 hopefuls, as their proposals would either make the problems worse, or are nationally unpopular.

After a stunning and resounding defeat in the US Senate with a 0-57 vote against the Green New Deal (with 43 Democrats voting “present”), a variation of that economic monstrosity supposedly designed to reduce carbon emissions has found a home in New York City. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, trying to out-left Bernie Sanders, is following in the footsteps of freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and apparently Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong), providing more evidence that she is the policy leader in the Democratic Party.

It has become fashionable among many of us to poke fun at Pesach getaways. Of course, the outer space Seder is non-gebrokts; all the food is powder. The Disney Seder includes costumed actors depicting Mickey and Goofy. Snorkel in the coral reefs to find the afikoman. How does one hide the Pesach getaway from the scholarship committee?

Some of the Democratic candidates are accepting reparations for black slavery as a plank on their platform. The idea was written about extensively in an Atlantic article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2014, saying that it’s time that America apologized for 250 years of black enslavement and 90 years of Jim Crow and discrimination thereafter – presumably even until the present. U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee from Texas introduced a bill in January of this years called HR40 to study the effects of slavery and the subsequent oppression of blacks on the wealth gap between whites and blacks: how and in what amounts reparations would compensate the descendants of slaves and financial oppression.