Share in Celebrating our Jewish Holidays and Life Milestones; Here’s a Way How
#1291 October 19, 2025
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: What has this collage of bar mitzvah and Jewish holidays photos to do with my weekly plea to you this week? Standing up for our people’s homeland starts with pride in our peoplehood. Here’s a place for us to share in showing it.
So what do these photos above have to do with the plea of this Here & Now #1291? My argument starts with a column this morning by a journalist friend of mine, Stu Bykofsky, Why New York Jews Should Reject Zohran Mamdani, on stubykofsky.com.
Stu gives lots of reasons nobody in New York should vote for candidate Mamdani, but let’s you and me stick with a reason that’s Dayenu for us. Stu cites candidate Cuomo as pointing out that while Mamdani in Thursday night’s mayoral debate said he recognizes Israel, he did not say “as a Jewish state.” Stu, by me rightly, asserts:
“The world has proven itself a very unfriendly place for Jews, who have earned the right to re-establish their historic homeland.
“The world has room for 53 Muslim-majority countries, some of which identify themselves as Islamic republics. The world has room for about 120 Christian-majority nations, even seven Buddhist states. India and Nepal are Hindu majority countries.
“Israel is the only Jewish majority country, even though 20% of its population is Muslim, who enjoy full rights in the democracy. Gays also enjoy full rights and protection.
“If you believe that only Jews should not have a national homeland, that is anti-Semitism, an accusation I do not level lightly.” [emphasis original]
Stu rightly concludes that given Mamdani’s “appalling support, yes, support for terrorists and appalling repulsion of law enforcement, New Yorkers voting for him should have their heads examined.” But Stu’s parting shot is a warning aimed specifically at way too many of us:
“And Left-leaning New York Jews need a serious reality check. They don’t recognize an enemy when he grins in their face.”
What Stu’s column this morning has to do with those photos here up at this #1291’s top is that when the leading candidate, in the heat of the campaign for mayor of the city with the largest number of Jews in the western world, denies our right to our Jewish people’s three-millennia homeland, it says more that’s deficient about us than about him.
We must get across to our fellow Americans our unshakable belief that the land of Israel – with historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria hill country heartland as its heart and soul, its very core – is historically, legally, indispensably and equitably exclusively ours, that Palestinian Arabs are the majority population of three-quarters of Palestine, Jordan.
Regarding how we must go about doing this, I agree utterly with what ZOA President Mort Klein said back in an April in ZOA release, What Does It Mean To Be Pro-Israel in 2025:
“While I understand that someone who wants a Palestinian state may be well-intentioned or believe that he is pro-Israel, in fact promoting a Palestinian Arab state is not a pro-Israel position. The Israeli people understand that such a state would be an existential threat to Israel and every Jew. Indeed, in July 2024, the Knesset voted overwhelmingly to reject a Palestinian Arab state, which only the nine Arab Knesset members opposed.” [emphasis added]
I’ll push our people’s homeland case further. It’s not merely that a Palestinian Arab state in Palestine west of the River would be “an existential threat,” which it would. It’s more than that. As Bibi put it recently: “This place belongs to us.” And U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, after President Trump’s “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank”: “Judea and Samaria belong to Israel.”
And now, finally, about those photos back up at the top. Unshakable belief in our people’s homeland derives from self-respecting pride in our peoplehood. And so I’m expanding (learning WordPress as I’m going along) the website my publisher created for my book, Here & Now: U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us, to include our “Grassroots American Jewish Street,” a place for us both to openly debate those issues and to exhibit pride in our U.S. Jewish lifestyle, e.g., with annotated photos of us commemorating Jewish holidays and American Jewish life milestones, taking vacations with Jewish themes, and more. Any number can play. Just email me stuff and I’ll post in your name. And directly comment on posts on the site.
When I was only nine years old and was aware that Israel only two years before had been established as a Jewish state, I felt pride and joy. More importantly, I felt that I had been cloaked with a sense of worth that I did not previously enjoy. The State of Israel blesses the lives and consciousness of Jews wherever we live in this world. Israel was established lawfully. All the attacks on Israel have been unlawful. Thank you Jerry for the commitment to write and publish these columns supporting Eretz Yisrael!
Thank you, Jeff. In the face of so widespread unjust vilification of Israel today, we must get through to more people in the West that such vilification’s aim is subjugation of Western religious and cultural heritage, destroying that sense of worth, as you put it, that we Western peoples enjoy.