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May 9, 2008

Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: Reverence, Yes; Worship, No

Mona Charen: Did Israel Drive Out the Arabs 60 Years Ago?

JWisdom: Ultimate opportunities by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

May 8, 2008

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Israel at 3,500+

Jonathan Tobin: Still Fighting the Same War

Steven Plaut: How ‘nakba’ proves the fiction of a Palestinian Nation

JWisdom: Taking Israel for Granted? by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

May 7, 2008

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg: Israel is irrelevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Dion Nissenbaum: Latest Olmert scandal could derail efforts to force Israel's compromises

JWisdom: My Inner Ventriloquist by Sara Yoheved Rigler

May 6, 2008

Caroline B. Glick: Anti-Zionism at 60

The Kosher Gourmet By Ethel G. Hofman: In honor of Israel's 60th anniversary, the former president of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, whose members included the likes of Julia Child, is back with a smorgasbord featuring the taste and essence of the Jewish homeland

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Jewish Deer in Nazi Headlights

May 5, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Busy work

Jonathan Mark: Remarkable half-century old Mike Wallace interview with Abba Eban puts current anti-Israel sentiment into perspective

May 2, 2008

Rabbi Berel Wein: Rote religiosity

Caroline B. Glick: Whitewashing Hamas

JWisdom: Parent trap?

May 1, 2008

David Zwiebel: Faith communities can learn from Orthodox Jews in stimulating private philanthropy for religious education

George Friedman and Peter Zeihan of Stratfor: The Shift Toward an Israeli-Syrian Agreement

JWisdom: It's time to wake up by Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis

April 30, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: Pennsylvania's Democratic slugfest may leave some Jewish votes up for grabs

The Kosher Gourmet by Linda Gassenheimer: Fresh herbs, sauteed veal and tiny creamer potatoes makes a light spring dinner

JWisdom: How to Build a Mentch by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

April 29, 2008

Daniel Pipes: Barack Obama's Muslim Childhood

Joel Brinkley: On human rights, the U.N. once again strikes out

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: When The Truth is Unbelievable

April 28, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: I'm often stuck in the doctor's waiting room for hours! Doesn't he owe me something for my wasted time?

Steven Emerson: New U.S. government policy advises agencies to avoid using some of the very same words that make up terror groups' names

JWisdom: Why You & I Never Die: A Jewish View of Immortality, Part I by Rabbi David Aaron

April 25, 2008

Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg: Schadenfreude isn't kosher for Passover --- or at any other time

Rabbi Berel Wein: The secret of how the data bank of memory is transferred from one generation to the next

JWisdom: Stepping Up to A Higher Spiritual Life by Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, Part III

April 24, 2008

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: The successful failure

Fred Burton and Scott Stewart of Stratfor: Placing the terrorist threat to the food supply in perspective

JWisdom: Stepping Up to A Higher Spiritual Life by Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, Part II

April 23, 2008

Connie Ogle: An intricate game of a novel

Jonathan Tobin: Making Sense of the 'J Street' Jive

JWisdom: Stepping Up to A Higher Spiritual Life by Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen

April 22, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Why Israel's 'Leaven law' matters

Caroline B. Glick: Obama the Savior

April 18, 2008

Rabbi Harvey Belovski: Multimedia tool of antiquity

Caroline B. Glick: Revealed Truths vs. revealed lies

JWisdom: More than miracles by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

April 17, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: Deconstructing Dayeinu

Rabbi Elazar Meisels: Is innovation at the Seder a slap at tradition?

JWisdom: Discovering Your Divine Mission, Part III by Rabbi David Aaron

April 16, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: A Prayer for Sderot's Children

Ethel G. Hofman: Sumptuous Seder

JWisdom: The Divine is in the details by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

April 15, 2008

Rabbi Dovid Zauderer: Let Charlton Heston Go!

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Jimma, tyranny's enabler

JWisdom: Relationships: Beyond Mars & Venus, Part IV by Dr. Lisa Aiken

April 14, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: The Snitching Supervisor

Jonathan Tobin: Forget the Fun and Games!

JWisdom: Sincerity is Valued Most by Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, M.D.

April 11, 2008

Rabbi David Gutterman: A Mystery in the Middle East

Caroline B. Glick: Why Ahmadinejad smiles

JWisdom: Elevated illness by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

April 10, 2008

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing by George Friedman: A Mystery in the Middle East

The Kosher Gourmet By Steve Petusevsky: The spring elegance of asparagus

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: The Power of Rational Lies

April 9, 2008

Michael Feldberg: An all but forgotten Colonial doctor who put his Jewish values before his life

Jordan "Gorf" Gorfinkel's "Everything's Relative" gets philosophical

JWisdom: Four Rabbis in Bnei Brak by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

April 8, 2008

Caroline Glick: Covering for the enemy

Elliot B. Gertel: 'House' goes Hasidic

JWisdom: Relationships: Beyond Mars & Venus, Part III by Dr. Lisa Aiken

April 7, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: I have a translating business. Recently someone asked me to translate some financial documents that are clearly forged. Should I agree?

Jonathan Rosenblum : Israel is unwittingly helping to fuel the international campaign of delegitimization against it

JWisdom: Matzah and leaven as a life philosophy by Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, M.D.

April 4, 2008

Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: The Mystery of Suffering

Caroline B. Glick: Fear of democracy

JWisdom: Dirty Jews by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

April 3, 2008

Rabbi Y. Y. Rubinstein: Parents --- and the children who would be them

The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Manweiler: Tempted by restaurant dressings? Don't be. Here are recipes that can be made at home, healthier!

JWisdom: The importance of retaining a 'slave mentality' by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

April 2, 2008

Mitch Albom: Child abuse, disguised as faith

Jonathan Tobin: Unreasonable Accommodations

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith with Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Eliminating Jewish Influence over Germans

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Oct. 10, 2007 / 28 Tishrei 5768

Sentimental journey

By Paul Greenberg


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — The last time I'd toured the Truman Library, as a young graduate student in history at the University of Missouri, the guide was the library's namesake. Always dapper — after all, he'd been a haberdasher in another failed career — Harry Truman was, well, Trumanesque. He was crisp as the white, pointed handkerchief in the breast pocket of his single-breasted dark blue suit.


With his natty bow tie and eyeglasses always in place, he could have stepped out of a political cartoon. He was folksy without being folksy, his style no-style, but just plain Missouri show-me. His manner might have been practiced, his best lines well rehearsed, but the whole effect seemed natural to the man and the place — right here. Independence.


While aware of the impression he was leaving — he was, after all, a politician of some note — the man had no airs, certainly not intellectual ones. He'd been there, done that, and didn't need to philosophize about it. He was an earnest student of history — the old-fashioned kind with heroes and villains, right and wrong. None of this Toynbeean murk for him. He knew what he knew, the rest he would learn — if he thought it worth learning.


Mr. Truman never did have much patience with the pretentious. At a particularly low point in his presidency, his party having just lost the midterm elections, a distinguished senator from Arkansas on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that he resign the presidency in the best British tradition. Much like a prime minister leaving office after a vote of no confidence.


Harry Truman didn't think much of that idea. And as for the senator who'd come up with it, he dismissed the Hon. J. William Fulbright as someone who'd been "educated above his intelligence." And that was one of his milder descriptions of the gentleman from Arkansas.


About the only feature I remember from my earlier visit to the Truman Library was a huge Persian carpet that had been suspended from the balcony. We'd pass it more than once during our brief tour, and each time Mr. Truman would say, "Yeah, that's a rug the Shah of Iran gave me."


The rug isn't there any more. The shah is out of fashion and the rug is no longer in sight. Political correctness must have overtaken even this monument to Give 'Em Hell Harry. A captain of artillery during the First World War, he may have acquired a certain familiarity with the stock profanities, but the elementary decency of the man shone through. He tended to rise above his surroundings. Maybe that's how he could be in Kansas City's old Pendergast machine but not of it.


By the time he was showing students around his library in the late '50s, Harry Truman was just another failed president. Communism, corruption and Korea had done him in, to quote the GOP slogan in 1952, and he'd left the White House with poll ratings somewhere down in the 20s. It was left to General Eisenhower, his successor in the White House, to demonstrate that decency could also prove successful politics.


As in 1948, HST would eventually stage a comeback, this time in history's ratings — not that he ever had any doubt he would. Or doubts about much of anything else, including his decision to drop the Bomb on the Japanese. He didn't believe in wasting time on remorse.


Now it was almost half a century later and we were being addressed by a Truman impersonator. He looked the part in his rimless eyeglasses, now back in fashion after half a century. The suit was a 1940ish double-breasted model, but the pointed white handkerchief in the breast pocket was still crisp. When he was leaving the White House, someone asked Harry Truman what he would do when he got back to Missouri. "Unpack," he said.


As a private citizen — a promotion, he would say — Mr. Truman was deluged with corporate offers to head up this or that new company, or at least lend it his name, or maybe start raking in fees for personal appearances. He refused, saying he didn't believe the presidency should be exploited that way. As I said, it was a different time.


The Truman Library was an interesting place even in the '50s, and it has been much improved since. It's well worth a visit. Particularly in contrast to presidential libraries that are newer and still intent on canonizing their subjects. Political passions take a while to ebb.


In contrast with the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, the more objective presentation of history here refreshes. For example, the arguments for and against dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima — and Nagasaki, too, lest we forget — are neatly and fairly summarized.


An exhibit on the tumultuous beginnings of the Cold War in the Truman administration sums up the Hiss-Chambers Case — our own bitterly divisive Dreyfus Affair — in the fairest terms. The text alongside Alger Hiss' picture is so balanced it's hard to imagine its being written when the debate over Hiss' loyalty still raged:


"Not all the shocks of 1949 and 1950 occurred overseas. In January 1950, the explosive case of Alger Hiss also grabbed headlines. Hiss was a former State Department official accused of spying. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former editor at Time magazine, had told a congressional committee that he and Hiss had once been Soviet agents. Hiss denied the charge, but his case became a national sensation. Because the statute of limitations on espionage had passed, Hiss was tried for perjury. His first trial ended with a hung jury. At a second trial, he was found guilty. The verdict, coming at a time of widened public fears about Communism, fed a growing hysteria about spies and traitors. Controversy over Hiss's conviction finally faded during the 1990s, when strong evidence that he had indeed been a spy emerged from Soviet archives and U.S. Intelligence files."


The passage of time and fading of passions allows a presidential museum to sum up even the most controversial aspects of an administration with even-handed dispatch. Compare the Truman Library's verdict on the Hiss-Chambers affair to the Clinton Library's exhibit on l'affaire Lewinsky. If you can find it.

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