Someone just wrote, wondering where I’d gone, whether it was the High Holy Days that kept me from writing. Forgive me for my silence.

But I’ve been overwhelmed--consumed really, by the most tedious of details and by the most monumental of issues. Here are some of the things on my mind.

Please understand: I have always been an October 8th Jew; I’ve always taken Jewish history as well as Jewish teachings both seriously and as ever-timely. Blood libels have always led to our ancestors being massacred and have also justified the torture, imprisonment, murders and exiles.

When, if ever, will American Jews fully awaken? Is there time enough to do so? I fear not. Early in the 21st century, I already wrote that the clock was a few minutes before, possibly after midnight. However, I’ve been at it for many decades, the signs have long been written on the sky: The world either means to kill us again as they have so many times before--or means to stand idly by allowing others to do so.

My own people paid little attention to my words--but our enemies sure did. One knows the measure of one’s power by the strength of one’s opposition. My words have been taken seriously by Western “wokesters’” and by Islamists and they have demonized and censored me accordingly.

In so doing, they have honored my work and the work of others.

People: Where are we now?

Many American Jews are not only in deep denial--they are directing movies and musicals that mock Jews, (”Shiva,” “Bad Shabbos,” “Slam Frank,” which uses the Shoah-era murder of Anne Frank as a way to launch the case for for an “intersectional, multiethnic’ genderqueer, decolonized Afro-Latin hip-hop musical”--and to ask whether “Anne Frank ever acknowledged her white privilege?”)

Where are we now?

Some, perhaps too many American rabbis are including the suffering of Gazans in their prayers; refuse to say a prayer for the state of Israel; still insist on prioritizing the fate of Others far before the fate of the Jews--as if that fate has nothing to do with them.

I cannot forget the Israeli rage against Netanyahu, far hotter than their rage against Hamas, Qatar, or Iran; the Israelis who want to live as if Tel Aviv is located in Berkeley, California, or as if the Jordan river is the Seine in Paris; who prefer the Israeli Supreme Court to the Israeli government. I fully understand the Israeli anger against the rabbanut’s control of the state (that is an issue for another time), their grief and bitterness about the murdered, the hostages, the wounded; I totally agree that we must have a full investigation of why Israel inconceivably, horrifyingly, failed to see 10/7 coming--yes, definitely, but only after Israel

is--what? Victorious? At least safe? Forced into a compromise with the Devil? Resigned to a lesser fate?

How many Americans could live with enemy and terrorist armies on their every border?

At this very moment, actually, on the very day of Rosh Hashana, did we--or did we not--all watch PM Netanyahu at the UN? Did we pay close attention to the vote against Israel and in favor of a country that does not exist and never has, a vote that is synonymous with the desire to “Kill the Jews, overrun the Jewish state.”

Really what more can I say about this obscene spectacle, one that far outdoes the Evian Conference and the saga of the S.S. Saint Louis combined? One can only say that the information is in: Israel stands alone but, with the grace of God, has some stalwart allies. As well as the IDF. As well as superior technology. And nuclear power.

Have we not been paying attention to the barbarian hordes all over Europe calling for a state that does not exist? Mobbing individual Jews, Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish schools, synagogues, centers, shops? Continuing their Shoah-era Jew hatred? Scapgoating the Jews yet again for the crimes of the entire world?

Who am I to advise the state of Israel? And yet--I keep thinking that Israel should finally institute the death penalty for terrorists with blood on their hands. And I keep thinking that any “peace” agreement must be as “proportionate” as Israel is expected to be in their military actions. One hostage for one Arab Palestinian “prisoner” with blood on his hands. Not hundreds of of such Arabs for one Jew.

Further: How can Israel trust the very nations that have just “recognized” a state that does not exist and who walked out on PM Netanyahu at the UN to maintain any kind of peace? How can Israel trust a so-called “international peace keeping force” the likes of which has never maintained the peace in Bosnia, (Srebenica), Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Nigeria--oh, I could go on but let me stop. And, how can Israel trust a peace-keeping plan that will be maintained by the very Arab and Muslim countries who have funded terorism against each other, against the West, and against Israel, and/or by all those countries who either looked the other way or who approved of it, profited from it?

Does anyone truly trust Hamas/Hezbollah/the Houthis//Qatar/Iran to disarm and to never return? If so, why? Can anyone trust the Islamified cowards of Europe to do so?

Does anyone trust the Big Money Men who see an economic fortune to be made on the backs of so much Jewish blood? (And yes, of civilian Arab blood in Gaza as well--I’m still Jewish enough to remember the blood of other innocents, if there are innocents in Gaza. )

I am not like other “As a Jew” Americans who use their ancestral identities as a credential to attack all things Jewish. I am another kind of “as a Jew.”

As I Jew I fully understand that I share in Israel’s fate.