Opinion

I’ve been interviewing politicians and diplomats for over four decades and have a confession: I take a particular shine to those who show any interest in me at all. I know that sounds egocentric. Why, after all, should the prime minister of Israel, the senior senator from Arizona or the ambassador from India care anything about my personal story?

The cards are stacked against Israel no matter what it does, but that doesn’t excuse the Israel government’s failures on the West Bank.

I interviewed Yehezkel Caine earlier this year (IJN Generations, July 3), I never dreamed that one of the topics about which we spoke would manifest a few months later. After all, a pilot hijacking a plane is “exceedingly rare,” according to Caine. If anyone should know, it is he. Caine is an expert in aviation medicine, which among its many facets includes the physical and mental health of airline crews.

Flydubai Flight #1073. Miracles within miracles within miracles: • The good pilot, the captain, manages to unlock the cockpit door despite suffering stab wounds to the head and bleeding to death. • The plane endured a drop of 17,000 feet in...

The weight of the loss of Oct. 7 is in the air.Because three years ago, Oct. 7 was the date of Simchat Torah. Now, it’s as though there are two official commemoration dates.The Jewish holiday. And Oct. 7.

“Hateful words targeting Denver Jews wrongly demonizes Zionism” is the headline over an op-ed in the Denver Post, Sept. 20, 2026, by Scott Levin and Rabbi Joe Black. I have penned comments on this op-ed. I invited Scott Levin and Rabbi Black to respond. Their comments follow mine.

In the current conflict with Iran, the opening of a Houthi front is pure von Clausewitz. Iran knows the war is deeply unpopular in the United States and that the midterm elections are approaching. Iran sees that there is a large element in the Democratic party and a smaller one in the Republican party that is so obsessed with using the war to tar Donald Trump with its failure that they will go to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure that happens.

If journalists value the free press and are troubled by attacks on it, journalists must live up to their own standards of curiosity, rigor and accountability; they must pursue the real story and not a token one, and a substantiated story and not a sloppy one.

Earlier this summer, when we published a profile of Ramah of the Rockies’ Rabbi Eliav Bock, one of my oldest friends told me that she and he shared a kibbutz family, one year apart, and that he was a close friend of one of her college friends.

There is just nothing like the joy of the holiday of Sukkot in Israel.The country seems transformed.Pulsing with an unbridled joyousness.