Many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections.

 

In Six Decades of Public Life, I Never Thought I Would Write This Piece

 

In 1920, H.L. Mencken famously penned an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, warning that on “some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” "Taking all of this together, the “Americans are stupid” camp makes the following conclusions: A lot of Americans are uneducated and ignorant. They can’t read or comprehend high school-level text, and they don’t know anything about how the American government works. Therefore, they consistently make bad choices when voting in elections, if they vote at all, and that is the proximate cause of so much political dysfunction. This is a problem, because it means educating Americans about an issue, or showing them data, or running on a platform “based in reality” won’t actually convince voters to elect smart, effective legislators into government."PM

 

By Robert E. Rubin - Mr. Rubin is a senior counselor to Centerview Partners and was the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999.

The economy has been voters’ top issue in four of the six midterm elections this century — and 2026 appears all but certain to make it five of seven. Beyond the cost of living, the war in Iran and tariffs, America faces a series of daunting longer-term economic challenges, from mounting federal debt to the effects of artificial intelligence.

Yet many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections. Nov. 3 could be a defining test for the rule of law in this country, and both our democracy and our prosperity are on the line.

There is a chance — some would argue a likelihood — that the midterms will proceed smoothly and honestly, with the winners seated in a straightforward manner. There is also the possibility that the election will be, like so much else over the past two years, chaotic at best and lawless at worst. From amplifying false claims of fraud and slashing defenses against foreign meddling in our elections to attempting to bully states into using an error-prone database to purge voter registrations, the Trump administration has already thrown up obstacles to fair and free midterm elections. There are widespread fears Mr. Trump and his allies could go further, including by sending armed federal agents to polling locations, seizing ballot boxes and exploiting a procedural loophole involving the clerk of the House that could enable them to refuse to seat duly elected Democratic members when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.

If the Trump administration launches an effort to manipulate the outcome of the midterms, the economic impact could be felt immediately, and it could last long after Mr. Trump’s presidency ends.

With the exception of the booming A.I. sector, corporate investment is already weak. The National Federation of Independent Business’s measurement of small-business uncertainty is 32 percent above its historical average. This seems like a bad time to inject substantially more instability into the mix.

The short-term risks from election interference look even more concerning when we consider the possibility that a fight over the outcomes will not necessarily remain contained to the courtroom. Mr. Trump has explicitly refused to rule out invoking the Insurrection Act in regard to the 2026 elections. Starting in late 2025, a surge of immigration enforcement agents into Minneapolis cost the city, its businesses and its residents an estimated $700 million. Sustained post-election chaos coupled with aggressive federal interference could create similar disruptions on a nationwide scale.

Any effort to undermine the election will eventually resolve itself, whether through political compromise, contentious rulings from courts, the use of force or all three. But the economic impact will outlast any immediate political crisis. The rule of law, undergirded by a tradition of free elections and the peaceful transfer of power, supports business decisions and attracts foreign companies to invest. It underlies the position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It bolsters investors’ confidence in the full faith and credit of the United States and lowers interest rates on our debt. The integrity of our elections, in other words, has been one of the keys to American prosperity.

The United States has not yet seen its economy suffer from a lack of confidence in its legal system. Other countries have. “We can live with high inflation,” one Turkish executive told The Financial Times last year, “but our biggest disincentive to invest is the lack of the rule of law.” A 2024 State Department report similarly identified rule-of-law issues — including lack of respect for property rights, repression of criticism and arbitrary investigations and arrests — as major impediments to the business climate in China.

The United States does not have to become Turkey or China to feel the economic impacts of a diminished rule of law. The economist John Maynard Keynes famously wrote of the “animal spirits” that encourage people to engage in market activity. Americans’ animal spirits have long been bolstered by the knowledge that their country is the best place on earth to start or invest in a business. A contested or overturned election could call that into question.

When I talk to leaders in business and politics, even many of those who acknowledge the election threat seem to consider such a possibility remote. They do not tend to take Mr. Trump’s attacks on voting seriously. That’s another way of saying that the markets are not pricing in what I consider a meaningful risk.

If Mr. Trump accomplishes in 2026 what he was unable to with respect to the 2020 election, or even if he causes widespread chaos by coming closer to his objective, it could create serious disruptions in the bond and equity markets. The yield on 10-year Treasuries recently reached 5.36 percent — higher than it was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis — in part because of concerns about the country’s policy trajectory. Election chaos could increase investors’ worry about the ability of our political system to deal with our fiscal problems, driving yields even higher. This would result in higher debt service costs for the government and higher mortgage rates and credit card bills for consumers, exacerbating our already considerable challenges.

I’ve lived my entire life as a citizen of a constitutional republic that provides rights and protections, and I’d like to continue doing so. I imagine most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, feel the same way.

Over the next few weeks, leaders in business and in all sectors of our society should work with state and local elected officials to help protect the political process that lies at the heart of our constitutional system. They can do this by making clear, nonpartisan declarations of support for election integrity, by supporting nonpartisan organizations that protect our elections and by using behind-the-scenes influence to discourage those who might be considering any steps to disrupt or overturn the midterms.

In more than six decades spent in and around economic policymaking, I never imagined having to write a piece such as this. If we act now, we can still protect our government, our people and our economy — and we can preserve the benefits that accrue to all of us, no matter whom we vote for, when American elections are fair and free.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/opinion/trump-midterms-election-threats-ice-economy.html

Life Inside Monsey: The Orthodox Town an Hour From Manhattan Most People Have Never Visited

 

History:

Rockland County was inhabited by the Munsee band of Lenape Native Americans, who were speakers of the Algonquian languages. Monsey Glen, a Native American encampment, is west of the intersection of State Route 59 and State Route 306. Numerous artifacts have been found there and some rock shelters are still visible. The Monsey railroad station, named from an alternate spelling of the Munsee Lenape, was built when the New York & Erie Railroad passed through the glen in 1841.^[4]

In 1943, Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz purchased a property in Monsey with the intention to raise the education level of Torah teachers. Named Aish Dos (Pillar of Fire), the institute comprised two buildings on a 16-acre plot. In 1944, it was reconstituted as Beth Medrash Elyon, Monsey's first Jewish institution.^[5]

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsey,_New_York}

Oy!

DO NOT VOTE BUT TAKE THEIR MONEY - CHILLUL HASHEM - STERNBUCH

 

VOTE AND TAKE THEIR MONEY - CHILLUL HASHEM - HIRSCH

HATE THEM - VOTE FOR THE ARABS - AND TAKE THEIR MONEY IN SECRET -SATMAR

Israel's Young Ultra-Orthodox Jews Are Turning Against Their Leaders | Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer

Karlin-Stolin Rebbe Attacked By Charedi Extremists Over Support For IDF Enlistment

Fringe Charedim extremists hurled rocks at the Karlin-Stolin Rebbe's vehicle Sunday night as he left a family wedding in Beit Shemesh, the latest in a series of attacks on the Rebbe, who has repeatedly instructed his chassidim not to respond. 

The Karlin-Stolin Rebbe was attacked with stones Sunday night as he left a family wedding in Beit Shemesh, in what the chareidi world is calling an unprecedented low by fringe extremists.

Rocks were thrown at the Rebbe's vehicle as he departed a simcha at his mechutan's home. The Rebbe was not injured, but the attack has sent shockwaves through the Orthodox world.

This is not the first time the Rebbe has been targeted. He has been attacked multiple times in the Meah Shearim neighborhood of Yerushalayim, both while attending simchos of his descendants and while leaving his beis medrash. Despite the repeated harassment, the Rebbe has consistently instructed his chassidim not to respond in any way to what he has called the disgraceful actions of a fringe element.

The chareidi public across all sectors has reacted with outrage and revulsion. Voices from every corner of the Torah world are condemning the lawless behavior and expressing complete rejection of those responsible for attacking one of the generation's leading Torah figures.

Rabbinic leaders are now being called upon to issue a sharp and unequivocal response to the violence, which has crossed every red line and brought shame to the Torah-observant community.

VIDEO: https://www.jfeed.com/hareidim/tn5l12

It Took A While, but History Has A Way of Setting The Record Right!

Ignaz Semmelweis – The “Savior of Mothers”

Ignaz Semmelweis (1860) aged 42 | Public Domain

The Covid pandemic has reminded us more than ever of the importance of washing our hands to stop spreading infections, but the idea that germs cause disease was widely ignored before the second half of the 19th century.

Decades before the champions of the germ theory formalized the relationship between germs and diseases, an unappreciated Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, showed the importance of correct hand hygiene in medical practice, using the example of the deadly puerperal fever after childbirth.

A man with a mission

Ignaz Semmelweis was born in a wealthy family of Budapest in 1818, the fifth of 10 children. He moved to Vienna to study law but soon realized he was more interested in the study of the human body. In 1844 he received his medical degree and started working in an obstetric clinic in Vienna.

At the time, giving birth could be a dangerous experience and the infamous puerperal fever accounted for the death of 20-25% of all women giving birth. Where outbreaks happened, they were documented by the local physicians, but considered unpreventable, and women were likely to die if they contracted it.

Now we know that puerperal fever is caused by bacterial infection, mainly Streptococci, but at the time the physicians ignored the concept of germs, despite the insights of medical men such as Alexander Gordon, who identified in 1795 that puerperal fever could be transmitted from woman to woman by the birth attendant, or indeed to the birth attendant if they had a wound.

Semmelweis was skeptical of the prevailing theories and wanted to figure out why outbreaks happened, to properly understand the transmission of this dreadful disease.

Crunching the numbers

Semmelweis started his investigation by comparing the mortality rates due to puerperal fever in the two obstetric divisions of the hospital. He noticed that the first division, where women were visited by physicians and medical students, had a much higher death rate than the second division, which was run by midwives.

Semmelweis went through all the differences between the clinics, including religious practice! But nothing seemed to explain the huge difference in the numbers.

A sad, but inspirational event

Jakob Kolletschka | Public Domain

In 1847, Semmelweis’ friend and fellow doctor Jakob Kolletschka was pocked with a scalpel during an autopsy of a woman who died of puerperal fever. Few days later he died, victim of the same horrible symptoms.

Semmelweis immediately saw the missing piece of the puzzle he was looking for.

Physicians and medical students that worked in the first obstetric division often visited women and delivered babies after having performed autopsies (in fact, treatises of the time encouraged surgeons acting as midwives to be involved in autopsies, to get familiar with the pathology of fever deaths), while the midwives in the second division were not qualified to perform autopsies and had no contact with corpses.

A simple solution

If the cause of the puerperal fever was some sort of “cadaverous particles” carried by the doctors from the corpse, the solution was to get rid of them before visiting patients.

Semmelweis experimented with different cleaning agents and concluded chloride solution could do the trick, as it worked well to eliminate the smell of the dead body from the hands.

He initiated a mandatory hand wash policy for physicians and medical students after they engaged with corpses and the mortality rate in the first obstetric division finally fell down to the same level as in the midwives’ division. And the number went even lower when they started using the chlorine solution to clean the medical instruments.

Defeated by the establishment

Despite the endorsement of Semmelweis’ theory by the reduction of the women's death rate, the senior staff of the hospital did not accept his conclusions and got offended that he suggested they were the cause of puerperal fever.

In his attempt to convince his colleagues of the legitimacy of his practice, Semmelweis got very angry and made some influential enemies. He was forced to leave Vienna and went back to Hungary.

Appointed head of obstetrics at St Rochus Hospital in Budapest, he enforced his hand-washing protocol and once again he succeeded in reduced women's mortality.

In 1861 he published his findings in a book that was not well received and was largely ignored by the scientific community. Semmelweis’ attitude towards his colleagues probably contributed to his downfall. His contemporaries described him as arrogant and bitter, prone to publicly humiliate his opponents. He also wrote open and angry letters to high-ranking European physicians, accusing them of being careless murderers. People around him began to feel he was going mad, and in 1865, he was committed to a mental asylum, where he died shortly after at the age of 47.

Posthumous recognition

Despite his breakthrough discovery in the field of infectious disease prevention, Semmelweis’ results lacked scientific explanation, and his contribution was not given credit until more famous scientists, Pasteur, Koch, and Lister, provided more evidence for the germ theory of disease, and the value of hand washing became more clear.

Today, the unfortunate Ignaz Semmelweis is recognized as a pioneer of antiseptic policy. To honor his legacy, the medical school where he taught in Budapest is now named after him, and Austria issued a postage stamp for 100th anniversary of his death by issuing a postage stamp. He even got his own Google Doodle!

https://www.frontiersin.org/news/2022/10/31/children-in-science-ignaz-semmelweis-the-savior-of-mothers

The Rabbis Who Cannot See Tomorrow: The Tragic Similarities Between Haredi Leadership Before the Holocaust and Haredi Leadership in Israel Today

Kasztner train passenger list page L25

The greatest failure of Jewish leadership is not that it makes mistakes. Every generation makes mistakes. The greatest failure is the inability to recognize that history is changing, that the Jewish people face dangers their ancestors never confronted in precisely the same form, and that yesterday’s answers may become tomorrow’s catastrophe. A leader who cannot imagine the future is not protecting tradition. He is gambling with it. And when that leader claims to speak in the name of Torah, his failure becomes more dangerous, because he can transform his own limitations into religious obligations for an entire community.

There is something deeply disturbing about the similarities between the mindset of significant elements of today’s Haredi rabbinic leadership in Israel and the mindset of certain Orthodox rabbinic authorities in prewar Europe. The comparison is not that the circumstances are identical, that every prewar rabbi failed, or that today’s Haredi Jews face a Holocaust. They do not. The comparison concerns something more fundamental: a style of leadership that can become so absorbed in preserving an established communal order that it loses the ability to confront a changing world, prepare the next generation, and acknowledge dangers that do not fit comfortably within its inherited assumptions.

The Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century was not caused by rabbis, nor could rabbis have stopped Hitler by issuing different religious rulings. Nazi Germany and its collaborators bear responsibility for the murder of six million Jews. Yet the historical record raises difficult questions about the responses of some Jewish leaders to the gathering danger. There were rabbis who warned, rabbis who organized rescue, rabbis who urged emigration, rabbis who struggled heroically to save their communities, and rabbis who themselves perished while trying to protect their people. There were also leaders who underestimated the threat, discouraged particular forms of escape, or could not imagine that European Jewish civilization might be destroyed on a scale previously unimaginable. To remember the first group while refusing to examine the failures of the second is not reverence for Jewish history. It is an evasion of its lessons.

The central question is brutally simple: What happens when religious leadership mistakes the preservation of its existing way of life for the preservation of the Jewish people?

That question should haunt every serious Haredi leader in Israel today.

Before the war, much of European Jewry lived in a world in which religious authority, communal custom, and inherited social structures were central to Jewish life. For many Orthodox leaders, the rise of secular Zionism was not simply a political development. It was a theological challenge. Jewish nationalism outside the traditional rabbinic framework threatened the authority of the old communal order. Some rabbis feared that secular education would lead to assimilation, that modern political movements would undermine religious observance, and that the promise of emancipation would prove illusory. These fears were not entirely irrational. Secularization could indeed weaken Jewish religious life, and modern Europe ultimately produced the most murderous antisemitic regime in history. But a legitimate fear of assimilation did not guarantee sound judgment about the future.

The historical record is more complicated than a simple indictment of prewar rabbinic leadership. Some Orthodox leaders encouraged emigration, some supported rescue efforts, and some risked everything to save Jews. Others were constrained by political realities, British immigration restrictions, poverty, disbelief in the scale of the Nazi threat, or the desperate hope that the catastrophe would somehow pass. Historians have documented the diversity of rabbinic responses, including the extraordinary decisions some rabbis made to save lives even when doing so required setting aside ordinary religious restrictions.

The lesson is not that rabbis as a class failed. It is that rabbinic authority, however revered, does not automatically confer political foresight, strategic wisdom, or the ability to recognize a historical turning point.

Yet the question remains: when the survival of the Jewish people is at stake, what happens when a leader’s ideological commitments prevent him from adapting to reality?

In today’s Israel, this question has acquired an urgency that no serious observer can dismiss. A significant part of Haredi rabbinic leadership continues to resist the integration of young Haredi men into military service, even as Israel confronts persistent security threats and a population of reservists carrying an extraordinary burden. The argument is familiar: Torah study protects the Jewish people, and uninterrupted full-time study must therefore take precedence over military service. Torah study is unquestionably a central pillar of Jewish civilization. But the transformation of that principle into a blanket exemption from the practical obligations of Jewish sovereignty is another matter entirely.

The State of Israel is not a Jewish community living under a foreign government, waiting for a monarch to grant it permission to exist. It is a sovereign Jewish state, responsible for defending millions of Jews. Its soldiers are not an abstraction in a theological argument. They are young men and women who leave their families, careers, and studies to defend the lives of fellow Jews. Some return wounded. Some do not return at all. To insist that one sector’s religious ideal must exempt it from the risks imposed on everyone else is to create a hierarchy of Jewish responsibility that is difficult to reconcile with the biblical demand that Jews stand together when their people are in danger.

The argument becomes even more troubling when rabbinic leaders present military service as an existential threat to Torah itself. Such rhetoric leaves little room for the possibility that a young Haredi man might serve honorably, preserve his religious commitments, and return to a life of serious Torah study. It treats the existing communal arrangement as though it were a permanent, divinely mandated institution rather than a social framework that must answer to changing circumstances. The result is a dangerous inversion: instead of asking how Torah can guide Jewish sovereignty, leaders demand that Jewish sovereignty accommodate their preferred institutional arrangements, regardless of the cost to other Jews.

The numbers make this more than an abstract argument. The Israel Democracy Institute’s 2024 report found that the number of yeshiva and kollel students had grown by 83 percent over the preceding decade, while the number of Haredim enlisting in the IDF had fallen by 36 percent. The same report placed the poverty rate among Haredi children at 47 percent in 2022, after government transfer payments.

These figures do not prove that Torah study causes poverty, nor do they erase the immense contributions made by Haredi families and institutions. They do, however, demand an honest examination of a system that increasingly relies on public support while limiting the educational and occupational options available to many of its young people.

What is the long-term plan? What happens when the next generation must support a growing population, compete in an advanced economy, pay taxes, raise families, and defend the country? Who is preparing Haredi children for the world they will actually inhabit? Who is ensuring that religious conviction and practical competence can coexist? A leadership genuinely concerned with the future would treat these questions as urgent communal responsibilities. Too often, however, raising them is treated as an attack on Torah rather than an attempt to preserve Jewish life.

Here is where the comparison with prewar Europe becomes most uncomfortable. The danger is not that today’s Haredi rabbis are repeating the Holocaust. They are not. The danger is that the same intellectual habit can reappear under radically different circumstances: the conviction that preserving the existing system is more important than adapting to an uncertain future.

Before the war, some leaders could not adequately imagine the destruction that was approaching. Today, some leaders appear unwilling to imagine the consequences of a demographic, educational, economic, and security crisis developing within the Jewish state. One historical setting involved the destruction of Jewish life by an external enemy. The other involves the internal choices of a sovereign society trying to secure its future. These are profoundly different situations. What connects them is the danger of leadership that cannot think beyond the boundaries of its inherited assumptions.

The prewar world also demonstrates why a community cannot afford to confuse institutional survival with Jewish survival. A yeshiva, a rabbinic court, a Hasidic dynasty, or a communal political organization may be immensely valuable. But none is identical to the Jewish people. Institutions exist to serve Jewish life, not to replace it. When preserving an institution becomes the supreme measure of religious success, the people who sustain that institution can become secondary to its continued existence.

This is the fundamental problem with a leadership culture in which questioning the established order is treated as disloyalty. If a rabbi cannot ask whether a system is producing poverty, whether its educational policies prepare children for adulthood, whether its military position is fair to fellow Jews, or whether its political alliances are strengthening or weakening Israel, then what exactly is his leadership for? A religious leader must do more than preserve the answers of yesterday. He must have the courage to ask the questions of tomorrow.

Jewish history offers a powerful alternative. The Rambam, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, did not teach Jews to abandon reason in favor of comforting illusions. He insisted that intellectual discipline, the pursuit of knowledge, and the responsible use of human faculties belonged within a serious religious life. The Torah repeatedly commands the Jewish people to remember the past, but remembrance is not supposed to imprison the future. The Exodus teaches that circumstances can change. The prophets warn that national privilege does not protect a people from the consequences of injustice and complacency. The biblical tradition is filled with leaders who were challenged precisely because the established order had become incapable of confronting reality.

And what of the famous Jewish principle that pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life, takes precedence over almost all other commandments? It is difficult to understand how a religious leadership can invoke the sanctity of Torah while treating the defense of Jewish lives as an obligation from which an entire category of young men should ordinarily be exempt. The question is not whether Torah study matters. The question is whether the Torah can be invoked to evade the collective responsibilities created by the very existence of a Jewish state.

The deepest indictment is not directed at the rabbis alone. It concerns the children who will inherit the consequences of their decisions.

A child born today into an Haredi family in Israel will live in a country whose economy, security requirements, and demographic composition will be shaped in substantial part by the future of Haredi society. Research published by the Israel Democracy Institute in February 2026 projects that limited integration in education, employment, and military service could place substantial pressure on Israel’s economic output and national resilience. Its analysis identifies the period between 2030 and 2050 as particularly important for understanding these consequences.

These are not merely numbers in an economist’s report. They represent the lives of real children. Will they receive an education that equips them to support themselves? Will their families have realistic opportunities to escape poverty? Will they be able to choose a profession without being treated as though they have betrayed their religious identity? Will they understand the modern world well enough to navigate it without fear? Will they grow up seeing the IDF as an institution that protects their families, or as an alien force from which their community must remain permanently separated?

A leadership that answers these questions only by insisting that the next generation study more Torah has not answered them at all. Torah can provide moral purpose, intellectual discipline, and spiritual depth. It cannot substitute for every practical skill required to navigate modern life. Nor should it be made responsible for defending policies that restrict opportunity in its name.

There is a further injustice here. Many Haredi parents work extraordinarily hard, struggle to support large families, and sincerely want their children to live meaningful Jewish lives. Many Haredi men already serve in the IDF, work in the economy, volunteer in emergency services, and contribute to the broader society. Many Haredi educators and community members are trying to create alternatives within their own communities. They should not be erased by a sweeping condemnation of their society. The issue is whether the rabbinic establishment will allow these efforts to develop openly, or whether it will continue to punish deviation from a narrow communal model.

If a young man wishes to combine serious Torah study with military service, why should his choice be treated as a threat? If parents want their children to acquire mathematics, English, science, and practical professional skills alongside religious education, why should they have to fight an ideological battle to obtain them? If a family wants its children to remain observant while becoming economically independent, why should the leadership not regard that aspiration as a victory for Jewish continuity?

A confident religious tradition should not fear the competence of its own children.

The most dangerous element in this debate is the confusion of faith with fatalism. Faith demands commitment to Jewish ideals. Fatalism assumes that human beings need not change their behavior because the outcome has already been determined by forces beyond their control. When a communal system resists practical preparation for the future and insists that spiritual merit will somehow resolve the consequences, faith risks becoming an excuse for institutional irresponsibility.

Judaism has never required Jews to choose between prayer and preparation. Noah built an ark. Joseph prepared Egypt for famine. The Jewish people were commanded to organize themselves, establish courts, defend their communities, and provide for the vulnerable. Even the religious traditions that emphasize divine providence recognize the responsibility of human beings to act within the world they inhabit.

The State of Israel makes that responsibility unavoidable. Jewish sovereignty means that Jews can no longer pretend that national defense, economic survival, education, and public welfare belong to somebody else’s domain. The Jewish people now possess political power, and political power brings obligations. To demand the privileges of sovereignty while denying its responsibilities is not an expression of spiritual superiority. It is a contradiction that threatens the solidarity on which Jewish sovereignty depends.

This is where Haredi leadership must make a historic choice. It can continue defending a system whose assumptions were formed under circumstances very different from those of a sovereign Jewish state, or it can help develop a new model of Torah life appropriate to the realities of the twenty-first century. Such a model would protect serious Torah scholarship without making it a universal exemption from civic responsibility. It would provide children with meaningful religious education and the practical knowledge necessary for adult life. It would respect the right of individuals to serve, work, study, and contribute without being branded traitors to their community.

Above all, it would understand that the Jewish future is larger than any single institution, political party, yeshiva, or rabbinic dynasty.

The greatest tragedy of the Jewish past was not simply that Jews were persecuted. It was that Jewish civilization was repeatedly forced to confront dangers that exceeded the capacity of its existing institutions to respond. The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime, and no responsible historical comparison should minimize its uniqueness. But the obligation to learn from Jewish history does not end with commemorating the dead. It requires asking what forms of leadership best protect the living.

The rabbis of prewar Europe operated under circumstances that today’s Israeli rabbis cannot fully imagine. Today’s rabbis, in turn, possess something their predecessors did not: a sovereign Jewish state, a powerful army, an independent economy, and the ability to shape national policy. With those privileges comes a far greater responsibility to consider the long-term consequences of communal decisions.

A rabbi who cannot imagine the future of his own children, who cannot prepare his community for economic and technological change, who cannot recognize the moral claims of Jews serving in the army, and who cannot distinguish the preservation of an institution from the preservation of a people is not exercising the fullest responsibilities of religious leadership. He may possess immense authority within his community, but authority without foresight is a danger to the community itself.

The ultimate question is not whether Haredi Jews should abandon Torah. It is whether Haredi leadership can summon the courage to defend Torah without sacrificing the future of the Jews who study it. The choice is not between faith and modernity, or between the yeshiva and the Jewish state. The choice is between a living tradition capable of adapting to reality and a defensive ideology that mistakes resistance to change for fidelity to God.

Jewish history has given us enough examples of the price paid when leaders fail to recognize a changing world. We owe the dead remembrance, but we owe the living something more demanding: the courage to confront uncomfortable truths before they become irreversible tragedies.

The Jewish future will not be secured by rabbis who merely insist that yesterday’s arrangements must continue forever. It will be secured by leaders who possess the wisdom to preserve what is eternal in Judaism while having the courage to change what must change.

That is the test of leadership. And it is a test that no rabbinic title, no political alliance, and no claim to spiritual authority can excuse anyone from taking. 

 

REPUBLISHED

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-tragic-similarities-of-haredi-leadership-before-after-the-holocaust/

 

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The best Orthodox Jewish blogs curated and ranked based on multiple factors, including content relevancy, subject expertise, posting frequency, and freshness of content. Blogs with highest credibility within the Orthodox Jewish space are ranked higher. This list is updated regularly to ensure it reflects the most active, influential, and valuable Orthodox Jewish blogs on the internet today. https://bloggers.feedspot.com/orthodox_jewish_blogs/

A Mandatory Listen - Nechumi Yaffe: An insider's dire prognosis for the Haredi world - and its cure

To The Supporters Of Full-Time Torah Study: You Are Being Scammed!

IMPORTANT READ: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-the-supporters-of-full-time-torah-study-you-are-being-scammed/

Antisemitism Taskforce Head Reveals How Trump Is Destroying Jew-Hating Groups In America!

 

The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles.

 

NOT THE BEST GUY IN LAKEWOOD

Anti-vaxxers target Texas measles doctors to cast doubt on deaths amid outbreak

Children’s Health Defense and RFK Jr publicly dispute recent measles deaths to ‘distract’ from damage caused and question vaccines, experts say

The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles.

But it was too late. Within a day of being ventilated, the child went into shock, her blood pressure crashed and she went into cardiac arrest. She could not be resuscitated. Her family, and the nation, mourned: she was the first child to die of measles in the US in a decade.

Yet some anti-vaccine activists soon began claiming that the girl died from medical malpractice, not measles, revealing a playbook that they are now running in Pennsylvania amid a growing outbreak – a message taken up by Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime anti-vaccine activist, as he publicly disputes the rising death toll.

The deaths in the US from measles – now numbering eight in less than two years – are a political minefield for Kennedy, centering him in a public backlash after years of his false claims about the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

The deflection campaign is already having real-world consequences beyond the rising body count. Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group previously led by Kennedy, claims to have sparked malpractice investigations into the doctors who treated the two young unvaccinated girls who died from measles amid last year’s outbreak in west Texas, which infected at least 762 people.

“At first they were going to throw out the complaints,” Brian Hooker, CHD’s chief scientific officer, announced in a recent video. “But they have, upon further review … decided that they’re going to let their own medical expert look at the records for those particular deaths. Because in each case, inappropriate antibiotics were prescribed, and that, I believe, led to both girls’ deaths.”

Paul Offit, an infectious diseases pediatrician and internationally recognized vaccine expert, said “it’s not a good look” for Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers for so many cases and deaths to rise. “So they’re trying to say, ‘Well, it wasn’t measles.’”

Katherine Wells, Lubbock Public Health’s director, agreed. “It’s their playbook,” she said. “It’s just another tactic by them to disrupt or to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. The issue at hand is that we’re having these large measles outbreaks, and they’re not stopping.”

It’s not just the deaths – it’s also the severe disease, Wells said. The “massive” outbreaks affect “families and communities and disrupt lives”, Wells said. About one in five unvaccinated measles patients are hospitalized. Measles erases immunity to all other illnesses for years, putting patients at risk of other serious infections. And survivors may years later develop severe measles complications such as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which is fatal and untreatable.

Last year, Hooker traveled to Texas to interview the deceased six-year-old’s parents, who said they still would not have vaccinated their children. A second child, aged eight, soon died from measles at the same hospital.

Hooker asked to see the children’s medical records, and he shared them with Pierre Kory, a critical care physician with no pediatric training who lost his board certifications for promoting Covid misinformation, heavily promoted the anti-parasitic ivermectin as a Covid treatment, and claimed that polio paralysis is caused not by the virus but by pesticides. Kory, who himself escaped legal liability in a malpractice lawsuit brought by the estate of a Covid patient who died as a result of his treatment plan, concluded that the measles deaths were actually the result of medical error.

Kory claimed the first child was prescribed “a completely inappropriate antibiotic” for a bacterial infection she developed because of measles, adding that “she did not die of measles by any stretch of the imagination,” but rather she died of pneumonia and medical mismanagement. He also attributed the second child’s death to “medical malpractice” because of her antibiotic regime. Secondary bacteria infections are very common with measles, which can create a cascade of deadly complications.

Privately, Kory reportedly said that he suspected the two deaths in young girls in Texas were caused by a weaponized version of measles.

Hooker and a colleague both submitted complaints to the Texas medical board alleging that the antibiotics were given improperly to the sick children. In the video, he said the medical board is reviewing the complaints. The Guardian and Important Context were unable to confirm Hooker’s claims. The identities of the doctors are not public.

Anyone can file a complaint with a state medical board, and boards take complaints seriously. Several leading anti-vaccine figures have received medical board complaints about their own conduct.

“The physicians went above and beyond, and the hospitals went above and beyond,” Wells said. Pediatricians in hospitals work with the sickest children, with high stress and relatively low pay. “It’s so hard to be told that you either wanted to hurt them or didn’t want to give the best care you could,” Wells said. Now, with the CHD accusations and possible medical board reports, “I think it’s in the back of everybody’s minds,” she said.

Hooker’s remarks about the Texas complaints followed the measles deaths of two unvaccinated infants in Pennsylvania. Hooker vowed to “get boots on the ground” in the state to “make sure that if it was a hospital error that it doesn’t happen again”.

Other anti-vaccine activists are helping to fuel the narrative. Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist whose board certification were revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine, noted on X that there was “no mention of antivirals, antibiotics, or steroids” in the case of the third measles death in Pennsylvania, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman. Yet the county coroner said the woman was not able to seek healthcare before she took a turn for the worse, so she would not have received medications for her illness.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/12/anti-vaxxers-measles-doctors-texas-deaths

The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.

 

Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity

By Bret Stephens

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.”  

In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.

It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.

It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.

It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.

 

It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.

It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.

It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.

It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.

 

 

Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.

It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/opinion/zohran-mamdani-israel-gaza.html

 

*UOJ'S RESPONSE TO RABBI EIDENSOHN ON THE MEANING OF AUTHENTIC TORAH-TRUE JUDAISM*

  *"Chassid"ism" is not Judaism"*

THE UOJ ARCHIVES - FEBRUARY 2007:

Chassidic movements today, regardless of the value it may or may not have had at the time of the Besht, are for the most part today, meaningless to Jews of intellect. The Rebbe today is a fraud capitalizing on the very essence of human weakness. Look around, save some good chesed organizations, the rest of it is like rotten stinking meat. The smartest of the chassidic kids are leaving physically, and much of the rest are trapped, and have left emotionally. But the chassidim are Jews, certainly not ones that we should be proud of.....

 

READ MORE: 

 https://theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com/2012/08/uojs-response-to-rabbi-eidensohn-on.html

 

Hasidic Rabbis (Zera Kodesh) and succession disputes | Samuel Heilman

To The Well-Intentioned Supporters of Olam HaTorah: You Are Being Scammed!

 

To the well-intentioned supporters of  Olam HaTorah, consider what you are actually being asked to finance. You are not merely being asked to support Torah learning. You are being asked to sustain an entire economic and educational system, one whose consequences extend far beyond the walls of the beit midrash and into the lives of parents and children. Yet the fundraising appeal rarely invites you to examine those consequences. Instead, it presents a simple moral proposition: give generously, because Torah depends upon you. The implication is unmistakable. Question the appeal, reduce your contribution, or demand accountability, and you risk becoming the person who stood by while Torah was supposedly weakened.

That is an extraordinarily effective way to raise money. It is also precisely why donors should slow down and think.

The question is not whether Torah learning is valuable. It is priceless. The question is whether every institution operating under the banner of Torah is automatically entitled to communal financial support without demonstrating financial responsibility, transparency, and measurable results. One can believe passionately in Torah while demanding accountability from Torah institutions. One can respect great rabbis while recognizing that rabbinic authority does not eliminate the need for accounting, governance, economic expertise, or independent oversight.

And there is a question that should be impossible to avoid: what happens to the children?

A child does not choose the economic circumstances into which he is born. He does not choose his parents' educational decisions, his family's income, or the structure of the community around him. Yet children can end up carrying the consequences of decisions made by adults in the name of ideology. When families are struggling to provide basic necessities, when parents are forced to depend heavily on communal assistance, and when young people lack the educational or professional preparation necessary to build independent lives, the appropriate response cannot simply be another fundraising appeal.

The children deserve more than rescue. They deserve opportunity.

This is where the community must distinguish between tzedakah and structural dependency. Charity is a sacred obligation, but charity should not become an excuse for never examining why the same needs continue to appear. The Jewish tradition understood the dignity of work, self-sufficiency, and teaching children the skills necessary to earn a living. The Rambam's hierarchy of tzedakah famously places helping a person become self-supporting among its highest forms. That principle should be at the center of this conversation.

So where is the comparable urgency for education that produces economic opportunity? Where is the communal investment in professional training, vocational education, mathematics, science, technology, accounting, healthcare, engineering, and the trades? Where is the serious conversation about ensuring that young people can combine Torah with the ability to support a family?

These are not anti-Torah questions. They are Jewish questions.

Indeed, the Jewish people have never historically understood Torah and productive work as mutually exclusive. Jewish communities produced scholars and merchants, rabbis and physicians, teachers and craftsmen, businessmen and scientists. The assumption that economic productivity is somehow inherently opposed to spiritual greatness is neither inevitable nor self-evidently Jewish.

The modern fundraising system risks creating the opposite incentive. Instead of asking how the community can gradually increase independence, it can encourage donors to assume greater responsibility for maintaining dependence. The donor is repeatedly asked to absorb the financial consequences, while the underlying model receives comparatively little scrutiny.

That is not a sustainable communal philosophy.

And this is where Olam HaTorah's supporters should be asking for specifics. What is the long-term plan? What percentage of funds reaches the intended beneficiaries? How are recipients selected? What oversight exists? What safeguards prevent waste, duplication, favoritism, or conflicts of interest? What outcomes are being measured? How does the organization determine whether its assistance is actually strengthening the future rather than merely financing the present?

These should be ordinary questions. If the answers are good, transparency should strengthen the organization. If the answers are uncomfortable, donors deserve to know that too.

Instead, the phrase "the gedolim have decided" can sometimes be deployed as though it ends the conversation. It does not. Great rabbis deserve respect, but respect is not the same as infallibility, and rabbinic scholarship is not identical to expertise in accounting, economics, organizational management, education policy, or labor markets. A serious Torah community should be mature enough to recognize those distinctions.

There is also a deeper ideological problem. When an institution tells donors that its financial survival is synonymous with the survival of Torah itself, it leaves no room for legitimate disagreement about how Torah should be supported. But there is a vast difference between defending Torah and defending one particular institutional arrangement for sustaining Torah.

Those two things must not be confused.

A donor can believe that Torah learning should occupy a central place in Jewish life and still conclude that the community needs a different economic model. He can believe that yeshivot deserve generous support while insisting that students also receive the tools necessary to function in the wider economy. He can honor rabbinic leadership while demanding financial transparency. He can give generously while refusing to be manipulated by fear.

That is not rebellion. That is responsible citizenship.

The most troubling part of the present culture is that the donor's generosity can itself become a mechanism for avoiding difficult reform. If every structural problem can be answered with another emergency campaign, why would the underlying system ever have to change? If every shortage produces another appeal, the community can remain permanently in crisis mode. The donor becomes the shock absorber for a system that has never adequately answered the question of long-term sustainability.

And the children are left waiting for adults to have that conversation.

We should not shame families who need assistance. We should not romanticize their hardship either. There is nothing inherently holy about a child growing up without opportunities that could have been provided. There is nothing spiritually superior about parents being permanently dependent upon charity. Poverty is not a mitzvah. Economic hardship is not evidence of greater faith. And a community that genuinely loves its children should want them to inherit more choices, not fewer.

The ultimate question, therefore, is not whether Torah deserves our support. It unquestionably does. The question is whether every dollar given in the name of Torah is necessarily advancing the Torah future we claim to want.

That requires honesty. It requires numbers. It requires transparency. It requires the courage to distinguish reverence for Torah from reverence for institutions. And it requires donors to understand that saying "no" to one fundraising model is not the same thing as saying "no" to Torah.

So what should a donor actually do?

First, do not respond to the appeal immediately. Put the checkbook away. Refuse to make a major financial decision while being subjected to an artificially created spiritual emergency. A legitimate organization should still be there tomorrow.

Second, ask for documentation. Ask for a clear explanation of how the money is distributed, who controls the funds, what percentage reaches the intended recipients, what administrative costs are incurred, and what independent oversight exists. Do not accept "the gedolim approved it" as a substitute for financial information.

Third, ask the uncomfortable question about outcomes. How does this money change the lives of the people receiving it? Does it merely cover another month's shortfall, or does it help families become more stable? Does it provide children with greater educational opportunity? Does it create pathways toward employment and self-sufficiency? If there are no meaningful answers, the donor should think twice before assuming that another check is the solution.

Fourth, separate your Torah giving from your institutional loyalty. You do not have to choose between supporting Torah and demanding reform. Continue supporting causes you trust. Support individual families in genuine need. Support scholarships, education, vocational training, healthcare, and organizations that demonstrably improve people's ability to build stable lives. But do not let anyone convince you that one particular institution has a monopoly on your religious obligation to give.

Fifth, organize with other donors. One donor can be dismissed as difficult. One hundred donors asking the same reasonable questions constitute a constituency. Major contributors should insist on regular financial reporting, independent audits, clear governance, conflict-of-interest policies, and measurable goals. Religious organizations should be held to a higher standard precisely because donors are entrusting them with money given for sacred purposes.

Sixth, make your contribution conditional when appropriate. Tell the organization that you are prepared to support Torah, but that continued support depends upon meaningful transparency and evidence that the money is being used responsibly. A donor's signature should not be treated as a blank check simply because the appeal is religious.

And finally, do not be intimidated by the accusation that asking questions demonstrates weak emunah. Genuine emunah does not require financial blindness. A Jew can respect Torah, honor rabbis, love yeshivot, support scholars, and still say: show me the numbers.

That is not an act of rebellion. It is an act of responsibility.

The ultimate scam would not necessarily be stealing money. It would be convincing decent people that endlessly financing the consequences of a flawed system is the same thing as fixing the system.

It is not.

If Olam HaTorah wants the confidence of the Jewish people, it should embrace transparency, accountability, educational opportunity, economic responsibility, and measurable results. It should demonstrate that its mission is not simply to preserve an institution, but to build a Jewish future in which Torah flourishes, families retain their dignity, and children have the tools to create lives of both spiritual and economic strength.

Until then, donors should think carefully before responding to another emergency appeal. The question is no longer simply, "How much should I give?"

The question is: What kind of Jewish future am I financing?

And that is a question no fundraising campaign, no slogan, and no appeal to fear should ever prevent a Jew from asking.

 

REPUBLISHED

 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-the-supporters-of-full-time-torah-study-you-are-being-scammed/

October 7 did not create this process. It exposed it, accelerated it, and transformed a long-term haredi dilemma into an immediate Israeli one.

 

Israel’s Haredim Confront the Burdens of Jewish Self-Government

After decades devoted to survival, a new generation is asking what it owes the Jewish state.

By Yehoshua Pfeffer

October 7 shattered a great many Israeli preconceptions. The word konseptzia—the “conception”—has haunted Israeli public discourse since the Yom Kippur War, when deeply entrenched assumptions blinded political and military leaders to evidence before their eyes. After October 7, the term returned with a vengeance. Hamas had been deterred. Economic opportunity in Gaza would create an interest in stability. Superior intelligence, air power, sophisticated border defenses, and a small technologically advanced army could manage the threats surrounding Israel. These assumptions, and the policies built upon them, have been subjected to relentless scrutiny ever since.

But the shattered preconceptions were not only military. In the months and years before October 7, Israeli society had become consumed by struggles of extraordinary intensity—over judicial reform, religion and state, constitutional authority, and the basic character of Israel itself. Political opponents increasingly appeared not as fellow citizens with whom one disagreed but as existential threats. Perhaps we had begun to assume that a prosperous and powerful Jewish state could afford endless internal fragmentation: that each community could fortify its own identity without weakening the Jewish whole, and that questions of common responsibility could always be postponed.

October 7 and its aftermath saw these assumptions crumble one by one. The Israelis murdered at Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Ofakim, and Nova were killed as Israelis and Jews; the soldiers who raced south to save them did not first inquire how they had voted. The international reaction supplied another sobering lesson. Responsibility for Jewish existence, we were rudely reminded, cannot be outsourced.

This does not mean a new era of civic harmony is about to emerge. Quite the opposite, as the current election season has demonstrated. Fierce arguments over religion, law, territory, economics, morality, and the nature of public life will continue to rage within a Jewish state. The question is whether those arguments occur within a prior consciousness of a common fate and mission—or whether our narrower identities become so complete that there is no meaningful Jewish “we” beneath them.

Every part of Israeli society therefore must conduct its own reckoning. The same earthquake reaches different buildings differently. This essay concerns how it reaches the Haredim.

Often described as ultra-Orthodoxy in English, haredi Judaism presently exercises immense influence over Israel and the Jewish people, and given its demographic trajectories, that influence is certain to grow. Israel’s haredi population numbered approximately 1.45 million at the end of 2025, around 14.3 percent of the country’s population; close to 60 percent of Haredim are under twenty, and current projections place the community at roughly 16 percent of Israel’s population by 2030. The question of how Haredim understand their relationship with Israel is therefore no longer an internal haredi question. It is one of the great questions concerning Israel’s future.

Nor is that future distant. Haredi conscription is already among the defining questions of Israeli politics. In a September 2026 survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, a party’s position on the issue ranked third among the factors Jewish voters said would most influence their vote, behind only “foreign affairs and security” and “the economy and cost of living.” The same survey found that 68 percent of Jewish respondents regarded the events of October 7 as a central consideration in deciding how to vote. Among Haredim, however, only around one quarter said the same, while 64 percent regarded October 7 as a non-central consideration. The divergence is striking. Most of Jewish Israel is entering this election with October 7 close to the center of its political consciousness, while that is much less the case for the haredi electorate. The question is whether haredi politics can remain untouched by an event that transformed the society in which Haredim live.

Haredim must ask whether assumptions underlying their social and political order were fashioned for conditions that no longer exist: whether a rapidly growing population can continue to understand itself principally as a protected minority; whether the burdens of Jewish sovereignty can indefinitely remain somebody else’s; whether political success can continue to be measured primarily by what we preserve and receive rather than by what we contribute; and whether a society built so successfully around separation can widen its radius of responsibility without sacrificing what the separation was created to protect.

I write from inside haredi society. I live in a haredi Jerusalem neighborhood, and my children were educated and continue to be educated within Israel’s haredi educational system. Yet my primary identity isn’t haredi, but Jewish. This was not always obvious to me. There was a period in which articles in the Hebrew-language haredi daily Yated Ne’eman describing Haredim as the exclusive bearers of the Jewish torch resonated deeply. But this period of my life did not last especially long. It became obvious to me that numerous groups carry the Jewish torch, each imperfectly and each in its own way. More importantly, I have come to believe that our fundamental identity as Jews precedes the narrower communal identities into which Jewish history has divided us.

More than any other consideration, this realization led me to become involved in HaTzibbur HaCharedi, the Haredi Public, a new political party running in the present election. I should state plainly that I chair its rabbinic council, and its founder, Moti Leitner, is a friend and former student. The party seeks to preserve the integrity of haredi religious life while confronting questions that concern growing numbers of Haredim: employment, education, youth dropout, military service for those not genuinely engaged in full-time Torah study, and the broader relationship between Haredim and Israeli society.

This essay is not intended as a campaign manifesto, nor will it predict the party’s electoral fortunes. It will instead address the underlying questions: why has this party appeared now, and what are the sociological and political factors behind its emergence? Political parties sometimes reflect little more than personalities or temporary grievances. At other times they are symptoms: institutional expressions of transformations already taking place beneath the surface.

My argument is that October 7 did not create this process. It exposed it, accelerated it, and transformed a long-term haredi dilemma into an immediate Israeli one. To understand those contradictions, we need to begin with one of the towering architects of contemporary haredi society: Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach, or Rav Shach, as he is known to his followers......

 READ MORE:

https://ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essays/haredi-politics-have-become-israeli-politics?

About the Author

Yehoshua Pfeffer, a rabbi and rabbinical judge, holds a law degree from the Hebrew University, and clerked at the Israeli Supreme Court. He has taught at a number of yeshivas and published widely on Jewish law and thought. He is the editor-in-chief of Tzarich Iyun, and chairs the rabbinic council of HaTzibur HaCharedi.