The many who read this wonderful publication are blessed to read some of my favorite writers — people like Caroline Glick (Mazal Tov to her — maybe), Daniel Greenfield, Giulio Meotti, Jack Engelhard and Phyllis Chesler and my dear friends and rabbinic colleagues (not their fault), Rabbis Steven Pruzansky and Avraham Gordimer. I write, too, and have been publishing my opinions regularly for more than 50 years.
My opinion writing began with Rebbetzin Irene Klass, wife of the publisher of the Brooklyn-based “The Jewish Press,” back in 1971. I was graduating yeshiva high school, about to begin college at Columbia University, and was going to pay my way through college with a mix of (i) a four-year state academic scholarship I won during the years before the racist Affirmative Action/DEI regime, (ii) a Columbia College academic scholarship I won (same circumstances: only merit, despite being White, male, and kippah-Jewish); and (iii) three summer months as a harried and utterly overwhelmed busboy at the old Pioneer Hotel in the Catskills. (I was not put on this earth to be a busboy, although my skillful clearing of empty dishes through three summers probably prompted more joyous public cheers of “Mazal Tov!” than any wedding musician ever did.)
One Saturday night, as Shabbat ended and we kitchen staff feverishly were busing off the tables, a group of guests at one of the tables started reciting Havdalah (the formal prayer marking the Sabbath’s end). I paused and walked over to hear the Havdalah, smell the fragrances, look at my fingernails in the candlelight, as is the custom, and respond “Amen.” As I started returning to my station to resume the tedium, a lovely elegant lady, Rebbetzin Irene Klass, gently called me back. She told me who she was and introduced me to the distinguished man, her husband, Rav Sholom Klass, who had recited the prayer. She told me she was amazed that, of the entire waiter/busboy crew working the floor of dozens of tables, I was the only one who had paused to listen to Havdalah.
We talked very briefly. She felt I had “something to say,” and invited me to write an opinion piece for her weekly newspaper and mail it to her. These were the days before email or even fax machines. With a shy smile, I told her that I just-so-happened to have an article in my pocket (!) I explained that I would write an op-ed every week by hand — pen and paper — imagining that I am a columnist for “The Jewish Press”(!), and I just carry it around all week in my pocket because I get intensely passionate about world affairs, especially as pertain to Jews, especially Israel.
I said that I particularly follow one writer in her newspaper who always really tells it like it is. So I read him every Friday night, while spreading out our family’s copy of “The Jewish Press” on our living room carpet after Shabbat dinner. I read her husband’s articles about tales from the Midrash and of our Sages, and I always read that other columnist, whether he is writing under the pseudonym “David Borac” or one of his other pseudonyms. Then, after Shabbat, I get it all off my chest and write my own.
She read the article I just so happened to have in my pocket, and she said “Wow! I would like you to write for ‘The Jewish Press’ from now on!” She even said she would send me a few dollars every week, a token amount, to reflect that she valued my writing. She said that, as long as she would be around, the pages of “The Jewish Press” would be open to me. And as long as she lived, they were. I even got to work there one summer, alongside my other favorite writer, the humorist Arnold Fine. May her memory be blessed, and that of Rabbi Klass. Zikhronam livrakha. Arnie, too.
The years went by. I found new outlets. While I was a rabbi in late 1980’s Woodland Hills, California, I started writing for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal (LAJJ). That Federation weekly was leftist, sort of like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) and Times of Israel (TOI). I phoned their editor a few weeks after arriving in California and told him off: “Your paper is so prejudiced, leftist, and anti-Orthodox. How can you be the organ of the Federation? I just got here and have never seen anything as biased as this.” He really was a darling guy, though. Really.
I will call him “Gene” (since that was his name). Gene hit me back with a challenge: “Rabbi, all the Orthodox rabbis in Los Angeles call me with the same complaint, and I will tell you the same thing I tell all of them. Start to send me a weekly column timely by the following weekly deadline, and I will regularly publish your column, no matter how disagreeable I find it. But if you miss a single deadline, that’s it. I am running a high-quality newspaper, whatever you think of its content, and I cannot have columnists regularly missing their deadlines. My experience is that all the rabbis who call me to complain end up missing the weekly deadlines almost right away. And they know it. It’s easy to kvetch. So here, I’m giving you your chance. Those are the terms.”
He concluded by saying that is why all his columnists are leftists and Reform. So now he was challenging me, a 34-year-old newbie: take it or leave it. He did not know what I carry in my pocket every week.
I began writing for the LAJJ every week for the next three years until it went under new management. My politics, religion, and writing style then are what they are now. Along came a new editor-in-chief, a very nice extreme leftist from the “Breira” days, ultimately married to a leftist reform rabbi, and he simply stopped publishing me. So I had to find a new outlet. One door closes; another door opens. I published a dozen or so op-ed articles in the Los Angeles Times, then published for a year or so in National Review, and finally landed at The American Spectator where, a decade later, I am a Senior Editor.
That exposed a right-wing, pro-Trump, heavily Christian readership to something they barely ever before had encountered: a Jew, an Orthodox Jew, an Orthodox rabbi Jew, who said, in plain and clear coherent English, that all the Jewish leftists out there — the George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Charles Schumer, Doug Emhoff crowd — are, by definition, apostates. They do not represent Judaism any more than Obama does.
At the same time, I began writing almost weekly for Arutz Sheva / Israel National News.
Why the passion to write? The need to write even when one sometimes realizes that, for all the passion and frustration and exasperation, it probably won’t change things? I think back to the lyrics from a song by Garth Brooks, “The Change,” describing the almost-hopeless effort of a volunteer trying to salvage — maybe — a single life buried under the rubble of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building:
And I hear them saying,
"You'll never change things,
And, no matter what you do,
It's still the same thing."
But it's not the world that I am changing.
I do this so this world will know
That it will not change me.
When I was an impressionable boy back in the 1969-1971 period, that columnist for “The Jewish Press” deeply impacted my life. In many ways, I already knew and intuited the facts and opinions he was writing. But his writing was so impactful, persuading me that I — a mere teen — was not the only one thinking and feeling these things. He just said it better. And as a rav ordained by the Mir Yeshiva, it was clear that he possessed the Torah learning and Judaic authority that secular “Jewish leaders” in the AJC / ADL / Federation world manifestly lacked. (Even now I note the paradox that Donald Trump has more Jewish grandchildren than they do.)
So I was reinforced by his belief that petitions to Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, together with reciting Tehillim (Psalms) alone, would never liberate Jews from the Soviet Union. And appeals to the “conscience of the world” alone would not accomplish any more for Soviet Jewry, Syrian Jewry, Iraqi Jewry, and Ethiopian Jewry than such “appeals to conscience” saved Jews from Dachau, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. And the way to deal with street antisemites demanded more than appealing to the local law enforcement for protection.
And that knee-jerk liberalism augmented by absurd alliances with left-favored groups that hate us would prove useless for Jews. And respected American Jewish organizations like ADL and Federation are not at all as “Jewish” as their fundraising letters say they are. And, to save the next generation, Jews need to spend more money on authentic Torah Jewish education than on Holocaust museums and on Jewish arts and crafts. And no one — no matter the circumstances or perceived benefits in “winning the love of the world” — has the right ever to concede an inch of Judea and Samaria because G-d gave the land to the Jewish people. Full stop. (And for many practical reasons, too). And every Israeli land withdrawal (Oslo 1993, Gush Katif 2005) results anyway only in being hated more and further stimulating their appetite.
His writings impacted me deeply. So it stood to reason for me that, maybe, if I would become a rabbi someday, and would write passionately enough, maybe I also could touch souls. Tell people forthrightly that heterodox (non-Orthodox) deviations and corruptions of the only Judaism revealed in the Torah are indeed corrupted deviations.
Maybe that might save one family or even one person from going astray down a false path that beckons. Maybe spare an innocent non-Jewish soul from pursuing and undergoing a false heterodox or "Open Orthodox" “conversion” — or sending children for the wrong “Jewish education” that is but illusory. Maybe some kid would print out an article of mine before Shabbat, read it over Shabbat, and someday do a better job than I do in passing along the legacy, the belief, and be willing to pay the price occasionally for not hiding the truth, while accruing the peace of conscience that comes uniquely when affirming it without compromise.
So that’s why I write even at times of exasperation.
I now write that it was criminal for anyone, other than direct relatives of the kidnaped hostages, to demand a deal “at any price” and that such a deal absolutely violates core Jewish law. (I have no right to opine on the desperation of those directly impacted.)
And, believe it or not, core Judaism expressly teaches that it is forbidden to overpay an extortionist ransom because of the principle of actual real Tikkun Olam. Mishnah Gittin 4:6. Yoreh De’ah 252:4. Mishneh Torah, Laws of Gifts to the Poor (Matanot Aniyyim) 8:12. That is “Tikkun Olam” — look it up.
If it is prohibited to overpay in money, which does not come back to murder but “only” incentivizes future kidnaping and imposes financial calamity on the community, it is so much more forbidden to overpay by opening prison cells holding hundreds of convicted mass murderers sentenced to dozens of life sentences without parole when they should have been executed promptly, to begin with, as they do in Texas and Alabama.
The present Hamas-Likud deal is one of the worst evils any Israeli government ever has perpetrated, more so than even the Shalit (one for 1,027 murderers and accomplices) and Jibreel (three for 1,150 murderers and accomplices) deals. It has prompted Hamas to stage world spectacles humiliating Israel, and mocking the premature boasting that Israel defeated Hamas because, if the war was about crushing Hamas and eliminating it from governance, then Hamas has manifested it has won.
And yet I write. It is so frustrating. So exasperating. How many times must we replay the same debacle, especially this time when it seemed that Netanyahu and Likud finally — finally — got it right. And no help on the way. Ben Gvir is not primed to garner the votes to lead, nor will Smotrich, not even if they run together. Likud is useless. Bennett less. Saar gave us the Attorney-General. Who else? Dermer? The Conceptzia Generals?
May as well vote for the guy who sits next to you in shul. He’s the only guy who has it all figured out.
Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest classes, interviews, speeches, and observations.
His recent statement on the Disastrous Hamas-Netanyahu-Trump Deal is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWkyLMRoJJY
His recent statement on the exasperating Hamas Celebrations during each hostage-murderer exchange is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P12TlJHUM2U
His recent statement on the proposal to transfer Gazan Arabs to Jordan and Egypt is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JinWymIQbuw
To be attend any of his three weekly Zoom classes — Sundays on the past week’s events impacting Israel and world Jewry, and Tuesdays and Thursdays on the Tanakh (Bible) and Jewish law — send a request to [email protected]