https://www.brandeis.edu/cmjs/noteworthy/ssri/hotspots-antisemitism.html
CUNY-Brooklyn, Northwestern, and many of the schools in the University of California system, are “hotspots” where the majority of Jewish students perceive a hostile environment toward Israel, and over one quarter perceive a general environment of hostility toward Jews on their campus. On these campuses it appears that the high rates of antisemitic harassment and hostility are largely driven by hostility toward Israel.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/02/mag-weiss-kidsbooks-00053509
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/01/trump-biden-relationship-2024-00054535
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/01/trump-biden-relationship-2024-00054535
So Trump and Biden compensate for each other’s problems, and they are effectively working together to get Trump nominated — which Trump wants because it’s the necessary precondition for winning a second term and Biden wants because Trump would be the riskiest GOP candidate in a general election.
It’s not the most edifying relationship. Indeed, it’s a de facto partnership toward a demoralizing rerun of 2020. But neither Trump nor Biden is as likely to get where they want to go without the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_slavery
Broadly, the Biblical and Talmudic laws tended to consider slavery a form of contract between persons, theoretically reducible to voluntary slavery, unlike chattel slavery, where the enslaved person is legally rendered the personal property (chattel) of the slave owner. Hebrew slavery was prohibited during the Rabbinic era for as long as the Temple in Jerusalem is not reconstructed (i.e., the last two millennia). Although not prohibited, Jewish ownership of non-Jewish slaves was constrained by Rabbinic authorities since non-Jewish slaves were to be offered conversion to Judaism during their first 12-months term as slaves. If accepted, the slaves were to become Jews, hence redeemed immediately. If rejected, the slaves were to be sold to non-Jewish owners. Accordingly, the Jewish law produced a constant stream of Jewish convertors with previous slave experience. Additionally, Jews were required to redeem Jewish slaves from non-Jewish owners, making them a privileged enslavement item, albeit temporary. The combination has made Jews less likely to participate in enslavement and slave trade.
https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/1750159/jewish/The-Slow-End-of-Slavery.htm
Slavery was abolished in the United States only after a civil war, and there were those who cited the Bible in defence of slavery. As Abraham Lincoln put it in his second Inaugural: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same G‑d, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just G‑d’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”
Yet slavery was abolished in the United States, not least because of the affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson, who wrote those words, was himself a slaveowner. Yet such is the latent power of ideals that eventually people see that by insisting on their right to freedom and dignity while denying it to others, they are living a contradiction. That is when change takes place, and it takes time.
If history tells us anything, it is that G‑d has patience, though it is often sorely tried. He wanted slavery abolished, but He wanted it to be done by free human beings coming to see of their own accord the evil it is and the evil it does. The G‑d of history, who taught us to study history, had faith that eventually we would learn the lesson of history: that freedom is indivisible. We must grant freedom to others if we truly seek it for ourselves.
One reason Democrats are thrilled to keep Donald Trump at political center stage is because they know they can count on him to continue his revenge campaign against fellow Republicans. Even by that all-too familiar standard of behavior, the former President’s smears against his former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao are especially ugly.
Mr. Trump has been pursuing a vendetta against Mitch McConnell since the Senate GOP leader denounced the former President’s role in the events of Jan. 6. Mr. Trump calls him “a broken down hack politician,” despite Mr. McConnell’s role in keeping a Supreme Court seat open in 2016 for Mr. Trump to run on. The Court issue was crucial to Mr. Trump’s victory, and Mr. McConnell was indispensable in getting his judicial nominees through the Senate.
The money line is itself rich since Mr. Trump spends almost none of his own campaign stash helping other Republicans. But the political-action committee affiliated with Mr. McConnell is spending tens of millions to elect candidates Mr. Trump endorsed and who have been struggling in the polls.
Beyond the unfairness to Ms. Chao, all of this relates to Mr. Trump’s role in the GOP. Instead of focusing on President Biden, Mr. Trump cares above all about settling scores with members of his own party. His politics is always about himself, not a larger cause. His vendettas have already hurt Republican prospects in 2022 by blackballing good candidates and letting Democrats divert attention from Mr. Biden’s failures. No wonder Democrats are thrilled to have Mr. Trump around.
Jean-Pierre concluded her roundup of Republican rhetoric by focusing on DeSantis. The Florida governor said last week that he was "sick of seeing" Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical adviser and the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is retiring in December.
DeSantis responded to Fauci's retirement announcement by telling his cheering supporters that "someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac."
"Just last week, we had Governor Ron DeSantis, [who] suggested that Dr. Fauci should be physically assaulted," Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday. "And former President Trump has done the same many, many times."
Too many commentators have blithely accepted the underlying but false proposition that a president may declassify anything he wants simply by handing it to someone or taking it home. Even the New York Times erroneously stated that there is “no Supreme Court precedent” that would limit a president’s power to declassify any documents he chooses to release. The Times notes that, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president is the ultimate “classifying authority” and, it is inferred, he may declassify anything, anytime. These commentators merely take issue with Trump’s contention that he did so with the files that he spirited off to Mar-a-Lago.
"Attorney General Merrick Garland's raid on Mar-a-Lago has ex-President Donald Trump back in the news. That's a problem for Republicans, who need to move beyond him," argued the tabloid, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
"But if the focus is on Trump instead, enraged Democrats will unite, pause their internecine warring while independents will abstain or vote against the GOP," the NY Post wrote.
"The next 10 weeks will be decisive. Democrats and the media will want to keep it all about Trump — he's great for ratings and clicks, and they don't want to review Biden's horrific record anyway," the NY Post wrote. "Republicans, and their candidates, need to keep the focus firmly on the big picture. Namely: Biden and the Democrats are an ongoing disaster — and Donald Trump is no help in digging America out of it."
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-favorite-newspaper-turns-him-mar-lago-fbi-1738411?amp=1
"Yes, Trump did much good in his four years: Notice how Democrats have opted not to repeal his tax cuts. But he lost in 2020 because too many Americans—especially moderates—had gotten sick of his self-indulgent behavior. Since then, his egomania has only grown," the newspaper said.
The Post said that Trump's "derangement" about the 2020 election "is why Dems control the Senate now, and his endorsements in this year's primaries have helped saddle Republicans with enough weak Senate candidates this year that retaking the chamber seems increasingly out of reach."
The editorial discussed Biden and the upcoming midterm elections before concluding that Trump would not be helpful to Republicans' chances.
"Republicans, and their candidates, need to keep the focus firmly on the big picture. Namely: Biden and the Democrats are an ongoing disaster—and Donald Trump is no help in digging America out of it," the newspaper said.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/31/politics/west-point-kkk-plaque/index.html
West Point, the United States Military Academy, has a plaque with the name Ku Klux Klan written out and a hooded figure displayed at the entrance to Bartlett Hall, the science center on the military academy's campus, according to a new report from the Congressional Naming Commission.
The Commission, which was established by Congress to provide recommendations to the Department of Defense on renaming Confederate markers on US military installations, released their second of three final reports to Congress on Monday.
https://news.yahoo.com/trump-attorneys-eye-popping-claim-074935027.html
An attorney for former President Donald Trump seemed to admit that the highly sensitive documents seized from Mar-a-Lago when the FBI executed a search warrant last month weren’t kept in the most secure of settings.
In fact, Alina Habba said on Fox News on Wednesday that the files were kept in an office where Trump “frequently” had guests.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/
The post-war white south embraced the Confederate battle flag, making it their sentimental symbol of the “lost cause” of the war. By the time Mississippi embedded it into its new state flag in 1894, the flag was used to both honor the Confederate dead as well as a romanticized version of the war’s purpose.
About 93% of racial justice protests in the US since the death of George Floyd have been peaceful and nondestructive, according to a new report.
The findings, released Thursday, contradict assumptions and claims by some that protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement are spawning violence and destruction of property.
The report was produced by the US Crisis Project, a joint effort by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University, which collects and analyzes real-time data on demonstrations and political violence in the US.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-response-doj-filing-blasted-full-nonsense-1738784
Conservative jurist John Yoo told CNN that the response from Trump's lawyers seemed "confused" and seemed like an effort to "really kick the can down the road."
"The thing it's missing is any response to the photographs and to the allegation that 100 sets of classified documents are found, which is really a startling claim by the government that you would have thought Trump would have responded to it here," he said.
University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck reacted with a tweet, saying "If Trump declassified everything, why are his lawyers agreeing with DOJ that any Special Master should have a Top Secret/SCI security clearance??"
John Brennan, former CIA Director, appeared on MSNBC’S "The ReidOut" Wednesday to discuss how he considers former President Donald Trump to be a "national security" risk with "nefarious intentions" after the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago home.
He went on to cast aspersions on Trump, appearing to imply that he was like a traitor who spied on his own government for foreign adversaries. "And the types of things that he’s doing, it reminds me of some individual U.S. government officials who were recruited by foreign intelligence services who did their utmost to conceal their activities, to conceal the documents that they might have taken and stolen from the U.S. Government," he continued.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/01/politics/trump-legal-gambits-political-risk-analysis/index.html
At the same time, however, Wednesday's filing also threatened to backfire since it appeared to admit to the transgression of which Trump is accused -- keeping classified information at his home. This could be another self-inflicted legal blow. Much like the revelations by the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection, the longer the process goes on, the more damning it seems to become for Trump.
While the ex-President has succeeded in politicizing the investigation, and uniting much of the GOP behind him, his gambits so far have often only revealed more and more damning evidence about his own conduct.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, seems to be constantly outwitting Trump's politicized and emotional defenses, which typically fail to address substantive legal issues.
https://reevesjw.medium.com/five-myths-about-robert-e-lee-d9d6fa331aa
The belief that the Confederate leaders didn’t really commit treason is widely held in America today. In 2017, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said of Lee, “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days.” Lee himself made a similar argument in 1866, when he said, “Virginia, in withdrawing herself from the United States, carried me along as a citizen of Virginia, and her laws and her acts were binding on me.”
Regardless, of Lee’s and Kelly’s view of the matter, it was always the position of the United States Government that Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the other Confederate leaders had committed treason, as defined in Article III of the Constitution. On June 7, 1865, Robert E. Lee was indicted for treason by a federal grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia. He faced death by hanging if convicted.
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2017/09/01/guest-post-a-current-officers-thoughts-on-robert-e-lee/
Lee’s Army killed or wounded 1,100 Union Soldiers during the 7 Days Battle, Lee’s first as the Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. From there, the Union suffered over 1,600 casualties at Second Manassas, 11,100 (2,100 killed) at Antietam, 12,600 casualties at Fredericksburg, 17,000 casualties at Chancellorsville, 23,049 (3,155 killed) at Gettysburg, and the list goes on through the 1864 campaigns against General Ulysses S. Grant, the siege of Petersburg (4,200 losses estimated), and Lee’s final surrender at Appomattox. (See: McPherson, James and James Hogue, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction.)
So should Lee’s statue be removed? The simple removal of a statue does not equate to destroying our common American history. It simply sends the message that Americans will not tolerate the honoring of such an intolerant man who was responsible for the deaths of so many Americans. A statue is not “history” in and of itself, but simply a reflection of how we Americans remember our past. Those who see this as a removal of history may be surprised to discover books, perhaps a better means of learning history than a statue.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a24208/what-an-oath-means/
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/30/europe/medieval-well-mystery-bodies-scn/index.html
The identity of the remains of the six adults and 11 children and why they ended up in the medieval well had long vexed archaeologists. Unlike other mass burials where skeletons are uniformly arranged, the bodies were oddly positioned and mixed -- likely caused by being thrown head first shortly after their deaths.
To understand more about how these people died, scientists were recently able to extract detailed genetic material preserved in the bones thanks to recent advances in ancient DNA sequencing. The genomes of six of the individuals showed that four of them were related -- including three sisters, the youngest of whom was five to 10 years old. Further analysis of the genetic material suggested that all six were "almost certainly" Ashkenazi Jews.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
Lee was a slave owner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that is often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:
The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most important, better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.
Lee’s cruelty as a slave master was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”
Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and parts of neighboring counties, was a little-known figure in state politics before the coronavirus pandemic. But, in the past year, he has led rallies against mask mandates and other public-health protocols, which he has characterized as “the governor’s autocratic control over our lives.” He has become a leader of the Stop the Steal campaign, and claims that he spoke to Donald Trump at least fifteen times between the 2020 election and the insurrection at the Capitol, on January 6th. He urged his followers to attend the rally at the Capitol that led to the riots, saying, “I’m really praying that God will pour His Spirit upon Washington, D.C., like we’ve never seen before.” Throughout this time, he has cast the fight against both lockdowns and Trump’s electoral loss as a religious battle against the forces of evil. He has come to embody a set of beliefs characterized as Christian nationalism, which center on the idea that God intended America to be a Christian nation, and which, when mingled with conspiracy theory and white nationalism, helped to fuel the insurrection. “Violence has always been a part of Christian nationalism,” Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist and co-author of “Taking America Back for God,” told me. “It’s just that the nature of the enemy has changed.”
At a rally Monday, Donald Trump added a new piece to the "rigged election" puzzle. He said the polls are rigged against him — which he's said before. Then he added another layer: The rigged polls were themselves a form of voter suppression.
The Gettysburg incident is another example of how Mastriano, who is a right-wing commentator and Republican gubernatorial nominee, has been connected to social media-fueled extremism. He has promoted QAnon; he has a “special relationship” with an online “prophet” who pushes violence-filled conspiracy theories; he has shared anti-Muslim content; he has posted an image claiming Roe v. Wade is “so much” worse than the Holocaust; and he has paid social media platform Gab $5,000 for “consulting” work. He also participated in the January 6 insurrection, which was fueled by social media and right-wing media falsehoods.
"Although I am a long-standing Republican, I am deeply troubled by Doug Mastriano’s embrace of dangerous extremism," Chertoff added. "Josh Shapiro, on the other hand, is a staunch defender of our democratic institutions and will lead Pennsylvania with honor and integrity. I am proud to support his campaign for Governor."
Several Republicans in Pennsylvania are throwing their support behind a Democratic candidate for governor after photos surfaced of far-right GOP nominee Doug Mastriano wearing a Confederate military uniform.
At least 16 Republican leaders have announced their endorsement for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro, days after Reuters reported that Mastriano posed for a photo wearing a Confederate uniform in 2014, while he was an instructor at the US Army War College.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/30/trump-justice-department-filing-warrant-00054319
Prosecutors obtained a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate after receiving evidence that there was “likely” an effort to conceal classified documents there in defiance of a grand jury subpoena, a new Justice Department court filing released Tuesday night said.
Fox News said that, contrary to Trump's assertion, Thibault was not involved in this month's FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago "at any level."
The network also reported he retired, and was not fired as the former president has said.
The congressional commission reviewing Pentagon property honoring the Confederacy is recommending renaming facilities and removing depictions dedicated to Robert E. Lee and other leaders at West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy.
Just received the update that Yad Moshe Hebrew printing finished]
That should mean it will be back in stock in America in a week or two
English version still available from Amazon
Contact Shanky's for copies in Israel
Berman and Levitz carry it in New York
Yeshiva University filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court Monday, asking the court to grant a stay on an earlier court’s decision that ordered YU to immediately recognize the Pride Alliance as an officially sanctioned club until its appeal to the New York State Appellate Division is decided.
Coming a week after the lower court rejected YU’s appeal for a stay, YU is presenting its argument to the Supreme Court on grounds of its First Amendment rights to religious freedom.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/29/mental-health-tiktok-instagram/
Instagram in June launched a pilot called the Well-being Creator Collective, which it says provides funding and education to about 50 U.S. creators to help them produce “responsible” content on emotional well-being and self-image. The program is guided by a committee of outside experts, the company says.
Republicans who blast FBI's Trump search are prepping to snag Joe in a Hunter Biden probe
Conversations Tuesday with more than a half-dozen House Republicans revealed deep concern about constituents panicked and infuriated by the FBI’s daylong Mar-a-Lago search.
“The base has lost its mind. If Trump decides to call them to arms, then I think he could get another Jan. 6,” one senior House Republican said in an interview, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday warned of “riots in the streets” if former President Trump is prosecuted for his handling of classified materials found when the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home.
“If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the Clinton debacle… there’ll be riots in the streets,” Graham told former South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy, who now hosts Fox News’ “Sunday Night in America.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/557723-message-to-trump-this-is-why-you-lost-the-election/
A number of Republicans with whom I’ve spoken believe that Trump’s bombastic, bullying, unpresidential antics probably cost him as much as 10 percent of the vote. Let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt and say it was only 1 percent. That still equals about 1.5 million votes. And, again, he lost Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona by a total of just more than 42,000 votes.
Nobody likes a bully, and few people like an insult comic as a president. It’s quite logical to imagine that Trump’s churlish, unpresidential demeanor caused at least 1 percent of the electorate to flip its votes.
Trump never had the support of most Americans. He lost the popular vote in 2016. His approval rating never topped 50%. On his signature issues of trade and immigration, public opinion moved firmly against him. Although he inspired undying passion among a vocal minority of fierce supporters, the election showed that feelings about Trump ran deepest in those who despised him.
