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By Steven M. Cohen: The overall American Jewish population size is stable and growing, but its character is shifting dramatically. The Orthodox population (Haredi, centrist, and modern) is exploding. The non-Orthodox are in sharp decline.
We can chart the rapid growth of the Orthodox by looking at their numbers in the Pew Research Center data over three generations, each encompassing 18 years of age. From old to young, we have the putative grandparents’ generation (age 56-73), the parents (28-45) and the children (0-17).
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By Alexander Smith, Paul Goldman and Lawahez Jabari: Donald Trump’s pledge to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem poses monumental challenges in one of the world’s most tense environments, according to experts.
Relocating the diplomatic outpost to the holy city is “a very big priority” for the president-elect, aide Kellyanne Conway told radio host Hugh Hewitt earlier this week.
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By Samuel Tadros: Little could dampen the enthusiasm of 13-year-old Tony Atef as he wore his soccer outfit and headed to Egypt’s most successful club, Al Ahly, to partake in the team’s junior soccer tryouts. After Tony scored two goals, a coach approached him, asking for his name to record among those accepted. But his dream of making the team died quickly, when the coach noticed the small tattoo of a cross on his wrist. Tony was quickly sent home. There would be no place for a Coptic Christian on an Egyptian soccer team.
Tony’s case soon went viral, after his brother took to social media to decry bigotry and discrimination. Embarrassed, the club invited Tony for another tryout, but it was too late. Similar stories soon emerged of other Coptic kids being rejected by other soccer teams. A newspaper pointed out that there wasn’t a single Copt among the league’s top 540 players. In fact, there had been only five Copts among the league’s players in the last few decades, and some of them spoke out about the discrimination they faced.
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By Yair Rosenberg: These days, it’s nearly impossible to talk about Israel and “peace” without falling prey to warmed-over platitudes and stale talking points. And in an age of political polarization, it can be hard to find voices who speak of the Jewish state out of genuine love, but who also passionately pursue the establishment of a Palestinian state—two opinions that absolutists insist cannot coincide. But on December 6, at the Israel Policy Forum’s gala reception in New York, General John Allen managed to confound these constraints, offering an affecting liberal Zionist account of Israel’s necessity and peace’s possibility.
Allen, a retired four-star general who most recently served as President Obama’s Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, was being honored by IPF for his work designing detailed security arrangements to make a two-state solution both possible and durable for Israelis and Palestinians. But instead of discussing that work at length, Allen, 63, opted instead to deliver a deeply personal speech reflecting on his Zionist upbringing, and the Zionism and philo-Semitism that has long been shared by so many non-Jewish Americans.
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By Leon Wieseltier: Contemplating the extermination of Aleppo and its people, I was reminded of a sentence that I read this summer. It appeared in an encomium to Elie Wiesel shortly after his death. It was a sterling sentence. It declared: “We must never be bystanders to injustice or indifferent to suffering.” That was Wiesel’s teaching, exactly. The problem with the sentence is that it was issued by the White House and attributed to President Obama. And so the sentence was not at all sterling. It was outrageously hypocritical.
How dare Obama, and members of his administration, speak this way? After five years and more in which the United States’ inaction in Syria has transformed our country into nothing other than a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time, they have forfeited the right to this language. Their angry and anguished utterances are merely the manipulation of the rhetoric of conscience on behalf of a policy without a trace of conscience. You cannot be cold-hearted and high-minded at the same time. Historians will record — they will not have to dig deeply or interpret wildly to conclude — that all through the excruciations of Aleppo, and more generally of Syria, the United States watched. As we watched, we made excuses, and occasionally we ornamented our excuses with eloquence. The president is enamored of his eloquence. But eloquence is precisely what the wrenching circumstances do not require of him. In circumstances of moral (and strategic) emergency, his responsibility is not to move us. It is to pick up the phone. “Elie did more than just bear witness,” Obama said in his eulogy, “he acted.” And he added: “Just imagine the peace and justice that would be possible in our world if more people lived a little more like Elie Wiesel.” Just imagine.
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By Jonathan S. Tobin: Yesterday, President Obama was not inclined to argue with Congress over Iran. The White House announced that, while the president thought it was unnecessary, he was going to let the Iran Sanctions Act become law without taking any action. The bill, which passed the Senate by a 99-0 vote, was largely symbolic, since everyone knew the possibility of Obama re-imposing the restrictions on economic activity with Iran it promises is an empty threat.
But the significance of the act may become clearer after January 20. If Donald Trump is as serious about revisiting the issue as he has claimed to be, then it may be the starting point for a genuine effort to restrain Iran.
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By Itamar Eichner and Benjamin Tobias: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu senses an opportunity to work with US President-elect Donald Trump to cancel the Iranian nuclear deal, despite his refusal to explain publicly how such a cancellation could be implemented.
While political officials assess a total annulment of the deal as slim, a number of channels do exist to bring about its practical demise.
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By Jonathan S. Tobin: When Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said yesterday that the president-elect had been talking privately about moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in the weeks since the election, a long-dormant issue sprang to life. Can Donald Trump get away with altering a longstanding U.S. policy by recognizing at least the partial sovereignty of Israel over Jerusalem, a change the foreign policy establishment has told us would lead a cataclysm?
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