Op-Eds

The Equality Act is a toxic mixture of opposition to discrimination and endorsement of discrimination against those who adhere to traditional values. Rabbi Broyde says our “approach is deeply mistaken,” but does not challenge the facts my co-author and I provided in the paragraph he quotes. The Equality Act deems Torah beliefs to be bigotry and acting upon them discriminatory. It’s as simple as that.

As a member of the National Council of Young Israel (NCYI) Rabbis, I learned quickly that, unlike OU congregations, Young Israel requires that the shul president be Shomer Shabbat (Sabbath-observant). Having been a rabbi at shuls with non-observant Presidents, I know first-hand the night-and-day difference behind the scenes when the Shul President is Torah-observant.

I hereby offer the 20 Democrats polling under 2 percent five surefire “woke” ideas to propose during the debates that rapidly will recharge the rockets on any sputtering Leftist presidential bid and lift them to unimagined stratospheres.

For the two thousand years after the Romans renamed Israel, the land of “Palestine” was synonymous with the Land of Israel. There never was an Arab political entity called “Palestine.” No Arabs denominated themselves “The Palestinians.” Open an Encyclopedia pre-dating 1964, and look up “Palestine.”

Even true friends of Israel in Washington, D.C. like Sen. Lindsey Graham have succumbed to decades of the Biggest Mideast Lie: that there ever was an Arab political entity of “Palestine” or that there ever was a “Palestinian Arab nation.” The dizzying repetition of that Big Lie for so many decades causes even United States Senators and House Representatives who should — and who privately do — know better to speak of “The Two-State Solution.”

After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) used “concentration camps” and “Never Again” together — a unique reference to the Nazi death camps — and then retweeted leftist Jews hoping to justify the linkage while she simultaneously denied that she ever connected them in the first instance, I honestly thought it couldn’t get worse. I was wrong.

Every politician knows you can’t needlessly offend ethnic and other constituencies. The idea that you can make a career out of bigotry towards a particular minority is a notion America was supposed to have discarded 50 years ago.

This is not a matter of making “political hay” – it is a matter of diluting and distorting the Holocaust. Liberals such as NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders condemned AOC’s remarks, as did NBC’s Chuck Todd. While I am not fan of these men’s politics, their position on this matter should be lauded, as they realize that the issue is apolitical and that a serious wrong was committed by AOC.

AOC is the product of a broken education system that deconstructs facts and reality, teaching instead that there are no facts at all. Rather, I have “My Truth,” and you have “Your Truth.” If college professors can spout any foolish, false narrative they wish, safe in the knowledge that their life tenure grants them a safe harbor to mislead, to lie, and to brainwash their defenseless minions who must get good grades in their courses, it is not surprising that O-Cortez emerged as she did.

One comes away with the impression that the now former Young Israel of Toco Hills (YITH) is a normative Orthodox shul that simply wants to be apolitical, and that National Council of Young Israel is simply too vocal in its political opinions for Rabbi Starr & Co. But there is more than meets the eye.