Alan Dershowitz gave a pep talk on Jewish influence to an orthodox audience in Scarsdale Tuesday night. His theme? Jews earned their influence in the U.S. by contributing more to its success than others, so now use your influence: “We have contributed disproportionately to the success of this country. We have done so much for this country. When you think of how much better this country has become since our grandparents and great grandparents took the risk of coming, here, we have not only the right we have the obligation to speak out, and use every piece, every bit of power available in support of Israel.”

Israel commits serious human rights violations, Bernie Sanders says at the Carter Center, defending his signing on to a letter attacking the UN for singling out Israel for condemnation.

Roger Waters on BDS: “Palestinians… should have equal rights. And that is my only beef. Just as all the people living in the US should have equal rights, all of them, regardless of their color, creed, race or religion– that is what I want for the Palestinians. Nothing more, nothing less. I’m not trying to destroy Israel.”

There is no proportionality applied to the question of foreign interference in U.S. politics. If there were, we would have a far more substantive investigation of Israel than Russia. But if anyone mentions the truth about Israel’s clout, the person is immediately smeared as “anti-Semitic” and targeted by Israel’s extraordinarily sophisticated lobby and its many media/political allies for vilification and marginalization.

When Israeli soldiers carried her novel in one hand and a gun in the other into Gaza in 2014, trying to kill “bad guys,” that was all that a writer could ask for her work, Israeli writer Dorit Rabinyan says in New York, in a tour sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

A leading New York rabbi says that Jewish Voice for Peace has “hearts of stone, Jewishly cold, lifeless and emptied of Jewish feeling,” and says the group’s statements on terrorism “would make Osama bin Laden blush,” and that they also seem to approve Bashar al-Assad. The April 7 sermon by an excited Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is a sign of how rocked the Jewish community is today by the threat of anti-Zionism and the boycott movement, BDS.

Jared Kushner is related by marriage to Hart Hasten, a Holocaust survivor and kingmaker in Indiana. The Hasten-Kushner clan is the Jewish connection Trump and Pence shared before they became political partners.

If Massachusetts Democratic state committee passes resolution opposing Israeli settlements, party leader Steve Grossman warns many Dems will say, “that’s the last straw. This is not a place I feel comfortable any longer.”

At Park Avenue Synagogue, former US ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro calls himself a Zionist, and calls Israel a “miracle” and a “jewel” and says its establishment was fulfillment of a centuries-old dream. Maybe we should have known this before he was ambassador?

The New York Times has run two pieces in the last couple of days arguing that religion has nothing to do with the real world. Passover is offered as a source of mystery, but not as a window on what is happening in Israel and Palestine. The Times is serving the winners, Leon Wieseltier and Shmuel Rosner, in the religious project that is Zionism.