To my fellow Jews in Israel: I, a Jewish American, agree with Senator Charles Schumer that Israel needs to have an election as soon as possible. I came to that conclusion long before Senator Schumer said it. I suspect that many if not most Israelis would welcome an election. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropped the…

Trump says immigrants who came through our border with Mexico are criminals who “pollute” America. I live in Southern California where many of my neighbors and friends are immigrants from Latin America who came to the USA through our southern border. They are regular Americans like the rest of us. In fact, most of us…

There once was a town called Khabno in a land still called Ukraine. My mother lived in Khabno a very long time ago when Mom was only eight years old. Can’t find Khabno on my map. Renamed Kaganovich for Stalin’s crony born there when Stalin ruled Soviet Union. Then the Holocaust. Our family disappeared. Khabno’s…

When I was a little boy, I was afraid of the dark. Baba sat at my bedside and told me bed-time stories of events in the old country, how Zeyda’s heavy coat saved his back from an axe during a pogrom in Kiev after Stolypin’s assassination, of Kiev opera stories where Baba’s friend worked and…

Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, envisioned his Zionist dream in his fictional novel, OLD NEW LAND, in which he depicted a Jewish homeland in the geographical land of Palestine in which Palestinian Arabs would welcome Jewish immigration because of the modernity that Jews would bring. In retrospect, that was probably naive. He did…