Shabbat dinners are not the same: “Large gatherings on Friday nights are out, but baking challah is on the rise”

Posted on August 2, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
How the Pandemic Is Reshaping Shabbat Dinner
by Leah Koenig
August 4, 2020

…In the warmer months, some people have moved Shabbat meals outside—to the backyard, the front porch, an apartment rooftop, or the park—allowing them to share a socially distant meal with another person or small group. Others have expanded their nuclear family into pods they consistently gather with for meals. But the crowded, boisterous dinner table of pre-pandemic life feels, for now, to be a thing of the past. With fewer guests to cook for, some people have experienced a drop in motivation. “It is hard for me to make my normal special food when it is just four people,” said Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein who lives with her husband and two sons in Brooklyn. READ MORE

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In-depth Israeli study finds that vitamin D could play a major role in defeating COVID-19

Posted on August 2, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

THE BEET
Taking Vitamin D Appears to Protect Against COVID-Infection, New Study Finds
by Lucy Danziger
August 5, 2020

Low levels of vitamin D are related to COVID-19 infection and hospitalization, a new study out of Israel found. When doctors tested patients for risk factors of COVID-19 infection, one consistent marker was low levels of vitamin D in the blood: Patients at the highest risk for infection and hospitalization also had the lowest blood levels of vitamin D, according to the study of nearly 8,000 people…The most astonishing news in this current study appears to be the fact that vitamin  D may even prevent someone from getting COVID-19 if the statistical analysis proves out. Of those tested, 90 percent of COVID-19 positive patients had low D levels vs 85% of those who were negative for COVID-19. READ MORE

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“Yes, suburbanites, Democrats plan to destroy your community”

Posted on August 2, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

SPECTATOR
Wrecking the American Dream
by Robert Stacy McCain
August 3, 2020

…The one question the media don’t want Americans to contemplate is what will happen if indeed Landslide Joe is elected. Because the Left — that is to say, the radicals who actually control the Democratic Party, and who would be empowered by Biden’s election — has some mighty ambitious plans for “reform.” Eight years of the Obama administration failed to accomplish their goal of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” or else Donald Trump never could have been elected. So this time, Democrats are going finish the job. And by “finish the job” of course I mean completely ruin everything. Consider, for example, the Biden plan to destroy suburbia. READ MORE

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Long story short: “Only credible military threats have convinced Iran to postpone its nuclear ambitions”

Posted on July 30, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

THE DEFENSE POST
Countdown to Israeli Action Against Iran
by Michael Makovsky
July 31, 2020

Recent mysterious explosions at Iran’s nuclear facilities, which some have attributed to Israel, return to prominence a calculation not seriously considered since 2015: Iran’s dwindling “breakout” clock. The ensuing damage might successfully turn back time on that clock. But if not, Israel might have to consider military action; a decision lent urgency by the looming American election… Having now reportedly produced enough low-enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon, with further enrichment, Iran could reach nuclear weapons capability in 3 to 4 months. This “breakout” window would shrink further if Iran installs advanced centrifuges. READ MORE

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“How coverage of the Jewish state became a signifier of the ideological activism that now permeates Western culture”

Posted on July 30, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion
by Matti Friedman
July 27, 2020

…Anyone following the doings of the past few months won’t need a recap of the attempted “cancellations” of scholars and scientists for heresies, the purge of editors for running the wrong op-ed, or the excommunication of J.K. Rowling. Adherents of the thought system vaguely described as “woke” believe themselves to be fighting evil in the name of justice. They share a hierarchy of good, a lingo, purity tests, and a stark division of the world into friend and foe, all of which borrow heavily from religious modes of thought. But one of the most obvious signs that religion is in play, and not merely empirical observation or political criticism, is the way this ideology has focused and amplified the condemnation of Jews. READ MORE

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Memo to Abbas: “The fact is, no other refugee population exists from the 1940s. They have all moved on to build their lives in the places to which they fled or in other countries”

Posted on July 30, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

FORWARD
The real killer of the two-state solution? The Palestinian right of return
Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf
July 30, 2020

…The overriding Palestinian demand, more important than the explicit demand of statehood, has always been the innocuous sounding right of return — the demand for millions of Palestinians, descendants of those who fled or were expelled in the 1948 war, to be recognized as possessing each a “right” to settle inside the state of Israel. This right, not sanctioned by international law, crucially overrules Israeli sovereignty; since the number of these Palestinians is between five and nine million, and since Israel’s Jewish population is about seven million, the meaning of such a demand is the transformation of Israel into an Arab state. READ MORE

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Knesset member: “Wow. Twitter just admitted that tweets calling genocide against Jews by Iranian leaders DON’T violate its policy! This is a double standard. This is anti-Semitism”

Posted on July 30, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

CLEVELAND JEWISH NEWS
Knesset makes effort to confront anti-Israel, anti-Jewish posts, hate speech online
by Israel Kasnett
August 1, 2020

…On July 29, the Israeli Knesset held a hearing concerning the growing concern of anti-Semitism found on social media….At the hearing, representatives from Twitter and Facebook were taken to task over the rampant anti-Semitism on their platforms. In the debate with Ylwa Pettersson, head of Twitter Policy for the Nordics and Israel, Cotler-Wunsh called on Twitter to adopt and implement the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, and utilize it to combat the hatred, double standards and violence against Jews taking place on its platform. READ MORE

ISRAEL HAYOM Holocaust survivors push Facebook to delete Holocaust-denying posts
#NoDenyingIt campaign posts one video per day advocating for Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg to remove posts and groups that seek to spread false narratives about the Holocaust as hate speech.

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Young Turks want to leave Turkey, irrespective of their political leanings

Posted on July 30, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE INSTITUTE
Turkey’s Brain Drain: Why Youths See No Future There
by Burak Bekdil
August 1, 2020

Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, once declared his political mission as “raising devout (Muslim) generations.” Research in recent years has shown that Turkish youths have defied Erdoğan’s most ambitious social engineering project. Konda, a pollster, found in 2019 that Turkish youths were less likely than the wider population to identify themselves as “religious conservative.” They were less likely to fast, pray regularly or (for females) cover their hair. Ipsos, an international pollster, found that only 12% of Turks trust Islamic clerics. SODEV, another pollster, found that 60.5% of youths that support Erdoğan said they would prefer to live in Christian Switzerland with half the salary they would earn in Muslim Saudi Arabia. READ MORE

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Ukrainian community “waged a six-year legal battle with the property owner to search the cellars for Jewish victims”

Posted on July 30, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

STL JEWISH LIGHT
Remains of 286 Jewish Holocaust victims uncovered in 2 basements in Ukraine
by Marcy Oster
July 27, 2020

The remains of 286 Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust were found in two basements in a town in southwest Ukraine. The remains, mostly women and children, will be buried in a mass grave in the ancient Jewish cemetery in Sataniv, Ynet reported. The town had an organized Jewish community for about 500 years before the Nazis captured it in 1941 and began systematically killing its Jews, according to the Yad Vashem website. On May 15, 1942, Nazi troops and Ukrainian military police locked the 286 Jews in the cellars and suffocated them. READ MORE

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#SethRogen’s opinions about Israel “are increasingly popular among young progressives who have replaced traditional Jewish religious and moral values with a menu of cultural Marxist ideas regrading race, victimhood, and power”

Posted on July 30, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

NATIONAL REVIEW
Why Seth Rogen’s Anti-Israel Rant Matters
by David Harsanyi
July 29, 2020

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Seth Rogen has, at best, a facile understanding of basic history, faith, or politics. We shouldn’t expect anything else. His job is to act. The problem, though, is that Rogen increasingly feels the need to share his illiterate opinions about serious issues with millions of people. This week, in an appearance on Marc Maron’s popular (and excellent) podcast, Rogen claimed he was “fed a huge amount of lies about Israel” growing up, and he now questions the legitimacy of the Jewish state’s existence. READ MORE

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