Pro-Israel groups are working to save the Hebrew program at Evanston Township High School, north of Chicago, where enrollment has slipped in recent years to only 34 students. “The message of these Hebrew programs are clear: If you’re going to learn Hebrew, you’re going to learn to love Israel.  No room exists for students to master the language while disagreeing with Israel’s policies”–writes Liz Rose, former Hebrew teacher in a Chicago area public school, who lost her job when she attempted to show students the Palestinian side of the story.

In a New York Times column suggesting that the dream of liberal Zionism is dead, Michelle Goldberg has the temerity not to quote any Jewish or Israeli leader. Only Mustafa Barghouti, talking about equal rights for Palestinians. What a breakthrough!

In 2016, Trump adviser Steve Bannon said that Benjamin Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson were “all-in” on moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and letting Jordan take over the West Bank, according to Michael Wolff’s new book. So who is setting U.S. foreign policy– but a foreign leader, backed by a billionaire who gave $25 million to the Trump campaign. But the media keep talking about Russia.

The divergent western reactions to Ahed Tamimi’s slapping occupying soldiers– of celebration or condemnation– show there is no middle ground left in the discourse of the conflict; but the progressive side is gaining some new adherents. Lisa Goldman was moved by the case to state that she lost her Zionism observing the violence in Nabi Saleh.

In a full-page ad in the Washington Post, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, an ally of rightwing nationalist Steve Bannon, has printed an all-out verbal assault on Lorde, the New Zealand singer who recently cancelled a show in Tel Aviv out of concern that she would be legitimating Israel’s occupation. The ad will only help the boycott movement, BDS, by causing other celebrities to steer completely clear of Israel gigs.

The fact that Israel kicked out 750,000 Palestinians and then occupied the West Bank for 50 years “was not inevitable and is still not irreparable,” Roger Cohen writes in the New York Times. But given the actual history, was it possible for Zionism not to be anti-Palestinian racism. The burden of proof is on Cohen.

While the world may think that Jewish Israelis are raucously celebrating Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Jerusalem’s Jewish community appears split on their feelings towards not only the announcement, but also the US president himself.

Talia Sasson, a liberal Zionist, says that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has fostered Palestinian “terror” but it can’t kill the peace process ’cause there’s no alternative to a Palestinian state. If Palestinians could vote, “Israel won’t be ever more the home nation of the Jewish people” and “Israelis will never accept that.”

Richard Plepler, the CEO of HBO, said he got his start in media humanizing the Israelis in a documentary during the First Intifada, when they were getting drubbed in the international press. He’s like a lot of other media execs and high-flyers, from Gary Ginsberg of Time Warner to David Cohen of Comcast, whose careers have included hasbara.

Cartoonist Eli Valley reduces all evangelicals to the very worst attitudes of some of them– racism and ignorance — and uses religious imagery to do it. When people do this to Muslims over support for Islamist terrorists or Jews over parasitical financiers, we call it Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.