BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

By Lesli Koppelman Ross Throughout Jewish history, Jews living in the Diaspora have been challenged by the question of how much to assimilate into the broader cultures in which they lived and how much to maintain a separate community. Today referred to as "dual loyalty," Jews have often been accused of disloyalty to their country because of their allegiance to their own community (and to the State of Israel). Approaching the issue from a traditional perspective, the author of this article argues that Purim offers a lesson in how Jews can be equally active in the Jewish community and the broader society. Logic and world history tell us that the conquered Jews should have adopted the customs and standards of those among whom they were forced to live. Instead, as Purim instructs, they saved themselves not by "fitting in" with the surrounding populations, but by maintaining their values and way of life. The philosophy they developed to compensate for their generally mis...

Bomb-sniffing dogs honored for service in Iraq I miss my dog. He was almost 15 when he passed away 17 months ago while I petted him. He was so sick. He wasn't always obedient and liked to "talk back" to me. But I told him to please go Home to God and we'd meet again someday... he actually complied. He was a true friend. When I became ill he stayed with me, something he'd never done before. While I was pregnant, he was never far from my side. When one of my kids had 47 stitches because of being bitten by a dog, he stay close to her. He's terribly missed. I am exploring getting a new dog. A rescued animal. I truly believe many animals, like dogs, can be God's expression of pure love and devotion on Earth. This story is a great example: For heroes, tributes and treats By Michael Levenson They were warriors with wet noses. No more. Johnny and Cody, bomb-sniffing German shepherds who served in Iraq, were honorably discharged from the Air Force yester...

Dual Loyalty And The New Republic Supporting Israel becoming litmus test for the left. by Jonathan Mark Eric Alterman, the media analyst, has always been sensitive, touchy even, on the question of “dual loyalty,” the belief that somewhere an anti-Semite is keeping tabs on the extent to which an American Jew’s support for Israel justifies Jew hatred. Few anti-Semites, though, have been as persistent, even merciless, in exploring dual loyalty as has Alterman, a Jew who admits to a dash of dual loyalty all his own. A columnist for The Nation, and a professor of journalism at Brooklyn College, in 2003 he essayed a column on Iraq in which he was concerned that the “primary intellectual architects” of the Iraq war “are all Jewish neoconservatives. So, too, are many of its prominent media cheerleaders,” prompting “the ‘Jews control the media’ problem.” Jewish “hard liners” on Iraq appeared, said Alterman, “at least from a distance, to be behaving in accordance with traditional anti-Jewish ste...