Even as Sen. Ben Cardin spearheads legislation to subvert Obama’s deal with Iran, he and colleagues ignore Israel’s 30-year defiance of nuclear nonproliferation and oversight

The great spiritual challenge to Jews is to deal with our actual status in western societies. What would the American Jewish community look like today if we moved beyond viewing ourselves as the eternal victim? And what would happen to the Israel lobby? A response to David Bernstein’s charge in the Washington Post that Phil Weiss is an anti-Semite.

NYT and MSNBC should be a little bit more careful about who they’re jumping to defend. Pamela Geller is not attacking jihadists. She is attacking Islam, a world religion, with more than 1 billion adherents, and saying that that religion is essentially evil. And she’s on US TV! Imagine them giving the mike to David Duke

Five years after Tony Judt’s death, Jonathan Freedland reports in the NY Review of Books that based on a meeting he had with Judt, Judt only intended his 2003 essay calling for a binational state in Israel and Palestine as a “provocation” intended to gin up the piece process. Horseshit.

After two years of siege and nearly one-year of rampant starvation, fighters from the Islamic State (ISIS) and an al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Nusra Front, overran Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria on April 1st, 2015. The militants launched a surprise midnight attack and beheaded three Palestinians during their first raid. Today they control an estimated 80% of the camp. In this area arrests, killings, and even the burning of musical instruments—which are considered sinful under the austere salafi group’s interpretation of Islam—are common.

Max Blumenthal reports from ‘Birthwrong,’ a week-long tour of southern Spain meant to counter the pro-Israel indoctrination of the Birthright program. Blumenthal writes on his decision to join, “The trip seemed like the perfect way to repudiate a grim Jewish nationalist vision buttressed by the dual poles of Israel’s ethnocracy and the phantasmagoria of Auschwitz. Not only did it offer a potential escape hatch from Zionism, it presented a real alternative by re-centering Jewish identity around a vibrant diaspora tradition.”

A Passover diary, in which a friend tells me that Jews need to forgive European anti-Semites their historical crimes because that is all that will stop Israel from reenacting the crimes against Jews

The question of punishing illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory was considered separately in Europe and Israel last week, with only superficial differences in the conclusions reached. Israel’s near half-century occupation is in no immediate danger, either at home or abroad.

A New York Times article celebrating sacrifice in the Israeli army on the country’s memorial day was deeply disturbing to Tzvia Thier, who has personally experienced such loss. These soldiers died in vain, for a government dispensing terror. Journalists should not be celebrating that sacrifice.

Within days of President Obama’s framework agreement on the Iran nuclear program polls showed that the American public supported the framework by almost 2-to-1, but the support weakened as opposition to the deal emerged from the Israeli government, AIPAC, other members of the Israel lobby. Jeff Warner and Dick Platkin deconstruct a column by Jewish Journal of Los Angeles publisher David Suissa which parrots the Israel lobby opposition to the deal.