To: Here & Now Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Here & Now #1250, 1/1/25
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Can you envision a brighter beacon lighting our way to framing and hence fulfilling new year’s resolutions this 2025 New Year’s Day than the Hanukkah menorah’s all eight nights’ lights? Below are resolutions I commend to myself, but why stop there? Here are resolutions I commend to folks whose actions affect us as Jews and Americans.
Chutzpah: One Grassroots U.S. Jew’s New Year’s Resolutions for Everybody
NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2025: Here goes:
President Trump: [1] Seal the Borders – stop the hemorrhaging; penalize “Sanctuary Cities,” deport illegal aliens, starting with foreign gangs and criminals, and bar their reentry. End “birthright” babies’ citizenship.
[2] Cut government spending, keep tax cuts, ease inflation. Make government workers show up for work.
[3] Establish election integrity – Election Day, Voter ID, citizens only, accurate vote counting. End “ballot harvesting,” voting-by-mail, other phony vote-enabling ploys.
[4] Enable energy independence and exporting, strengthen electrical grid vs. EMT attack, end “green” insanity.
[5] End gender insanity – mutilation of minors, boys in girls’ sports, etc.
[6] End DEI, CRT and similar insanities, restore education to the states and local school boards, which are closer to the people than the federal government.
[7] Fight fentanyl and other drugs devastating Americans.
[8] Restore the U.S. standing by Israel, including in the UN and through unhindered arms’ shipments, and fight anti-Semitism in the U.S.
World’s Israel-Bashing Envoys to the UN in New York: Take the subway to work.
Israel and Israelis: [1] Parachute a brigade of Mizrahi and Ethiopian Israelis into U.S. college campuses and districts of “Squad” and other Congresspeople who call Israel “white colonial oppressor of Palestinian natives.” Make clear majority of Israelis are Middle-eastern, not European.
[2] Send sensible Israelis to American Reform Jewish congregations, getting across to their grassroots members that “the two-state solution,” so beloved by our Jewish people’s enemies, would rip from Israel its heart and soul – historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount with its Western Wall, City of David with its Pilgrimage Road, and all) and defensible Judea-Samaria biblical hill country heartland – rendering our Jewish people’s homeland militarily indefensible and Jewishly meaningless.
[3] Build on the grounds of Yad Vashem, where you take visiting international VIPs, a museum vividly documenting the continuous, tenacious post-biblical Jewish homeland-claiming Jewish physical presence that historian Parkes showed wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” [President Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid incorrectly put in its opening “Historical Chronology”: AD “135: Romans suppress a Jewish revolt, killing or forcing almost all Jews of Judaea into exile.” This “Historical Chronology” of Palestine doesn’t mention Jews again until 1917.]
[4] Establish presence and prayer equality for non-Muslims on Temple Mount. Make the case, citing Ritmeyer, that much of the exterior and interior of the Temple Mount, not just the Western Wall prayer area, still stands as irrefutable evidence that Jewish biblical history happened.
[5] Stop beating up on Bibi (recall Jews fighting Jews with the Romans approaching the gates). Figure out a way to make Israeli elections elect people. End Supreme Court justices appointing the Court’s justices’ successors, end “reasonableness” standard. Add standing and justiciability jurisdiction requirements, as for U.S. Supreme Court. (See Rabbi Dov Fischer, Jewish Press, 7/30/23, A Reasonable Solution to Israel’s Judicial Reform Debate.)
Grassroots American Jews: [1] Stop listening to our “leaders” who, e.g., condemn “ongoing West Bank occupation” and call for “halting the construction of West Bank settlements” and call for establishing an inside-the-land-of-Israel “Palestinian State,” and oppose “any efforts toward unilateral annexation by Israel of areas of the West Bank.” [Alas, Reform movement leaders’ statement February 2024]
[2] Understand that there exists an equitable alternative to “the two-state solution,” described in former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s new book One Jewish State. It would give Palestinian Arabs civil autonomy in areas of Judea-Samaria under Israeli security control over the entirety of the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan. Like Puerto Ricans, they would vote in local but not national elections, and pay less national taxes. This is in addition to Palestinian Arab population majority in judenrein Jordan, comprising three-quarters of Mandated Palestine, and population exclusivity in another part of Palestine, Gaza. So unequivocally make the case to our fellow Americans that the land of Israel – Palestine west of the Jordan – is historically, legally, indispensably and equitably the homeland of Jews, not of Arabs, rulers of 99% of the Mideast.
[3] Abandon support of “the two-state solution” and opposition to Israelis reining in of its democracy-damaging Supreme Court, and don’t be “taken for granted” by the Democratic Party regardless of its positions on our Jewish people’s homeland of Israel.
[4] Stop saying the loaded lexicon’s Jewish homeland-delegitimizing poisoned pejoratives – West Bank … occupation … Palestinian territories … settlements … 1967 [i.e., 1949] borders … annexation [implies other country’s territory, accurate is “sovereignty application”] … captured by Israel in 1967 [off by 3000 years], etc.
[5] In 2025, read at least one good book on Israel. Out of my more-than-one-thousand-volume non-fiction private library the parrot and I have on Israel, I particularly commend to you
*** on Israel-Arab peace solutions David Friedman’s new One Jewish State (extra credit: first read his Sledgehammer, which he and his colleagues took to the decades long failed “peace process”);
*** on the Temple Mount, from its still-standing walls and underground interior down to the still-visible on the Rock in the Dome of the Rock slot King Solomon carved for placement of the Ark of the Covenant, archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer’s Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (extra credit: Ritmeyer’s fuller The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem);
*** on the Six Day War, which “the two-state solution” would reverse, and what historic Jerusalem’s liberation means to Israelis, Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate;
*** on the Aliyah Bet, Palestinian Jews’ and U.S. WW II vet volunteers’ sailing of Holocaust survivors into the teeth of the anti-Jewish British Palestine blockade, Arie Eliav’s moving Voyage of the Ulua;
*** and for the excitement of it and transformation (really) of naval warfare from the battleship to the missile boat age, Abraham Rabinovich’s can’t-put-down The Boats of Cherbourg.
Me: I had an hour-long phone conversation this week with a good friend, old beer-drinking buddy, and fellow activist in pro-Israel U.S. Jewish affairs, in which we differed deeply on activism in 2025. He takes the position, with pro-Hamas activism now so deeply entrenched here, that arousing more responsive pro-Israel activism among our U.S. Jewish grassroots is too little, too late, that we should nudge our communal leaders to act. I disagree re our grassroots.
This is the very first page of my book:
Here & Now:
U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with these “best” of a conservative grassroots U.S. Jew’s weekly analyses over a Quarter Century. They’ll make you think about issues confronting us from Anti-Israel Media Bias to Zionism, and that matters a lot.
I’m betting, of course, that if I can just slip into your “read a good Israel book” 2025 resolution this by-subject-organized compilation of excerpts of weekly emails of mine, I’ll prevail in invigorating your pride in our people’s historic homeland and activism, or, if you’re indifferent, even “woke,” wake you up. (Amazon, Verlin, Here & Now: U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us]
I’m going a step further. My book’s publisher and I are building a website. It’ll feature my book, of course, but we hope to make it broader than that, through a group of bloggers on all U.S. Jews’ Issues Confronting Us, as my book’s subtitle puts it, to generate a grassroots Jews’ site for interactive exchange of activism efforts on these crucial matters. I hope you’ll join as a regular commenter on these grassroots Jews’ blog postings, and in involving more of our fellow grassroots American Jews in pro-Israel and antisemitism-fighting awareness and activism. More to follow.
Best New Year’s wishes,
Jerry Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Jerome+Verlin&i=stripbooks&crid=29G4BKBKZDSAC&sprefix=jerome+verlin%2Cstripbooks%2C81&ref=nb_sb_noss