Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The New York Times published an anti-Semitic cartoon depicting a blind Donald Trump being led by a canine Benjamin Netanyahu in its international edition earlier this year. Following near-universal condemnation, Trump seemed more concerned for himself than for the Jews. His tweet on the matter was typically puerile: 'The New York Times has apologized for the terrible Anti-Semitic Cartoon, but they haven’t apologized to me for this or all of the Fake and Corrupt news they print on a daily basis.

There’s a few fundamental problems with the idea of ‘believe all women,’ or more broadly, ‘believe all victims.’ The first is that our entire justice system is built upon the opposite idea, that people are in fact innocent until proven otherwise. The second is that as our definition of sexual assault keeps changing by the minute, it’s possible for two people to experience the same encounter in radically different ways, with one person believing they just had entirely consensual sex, and the other believing they were assaulted. The third, and most important: there are bad people in this world. And bad people lie.

On Sunday, Beto O’Rourke claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t ‘represent the true will of the Israeli people.’ Israel is a democracy in which every citizen has the right to vote, a fact of international trivia apparently lost on O’Rourke. Although it’s easy to criticize Bibi for many of his recent remarks — and for his recent decision to welcome the racist Jewish Power party into the mainstream, it’s silly to argue that he doesn’t represent the true will of the Israeli people. The Israeli people have spoken for more than a decade: they like to have Bibi at the helm. It’s possible the Israeli people will have something new to say in their election today.

There are many details and facts in the Jussie Smollett saga that we don’t yet know. And because the Cook County State’s Attorney announced today that they are dropping the charges against the actor, there’s a good chance that we never will. But there are some things we do know: Smollett had originally told the police that he was a victim of what clearly sounded like a hate crime. Per his story, two people attacked him, yelled homophobic and racist sentiments, screamed ‘this is MAGA country,’ and even tied a noose around his neck. After weeks of investigation, Chicago police determined that Smollett had in fact hired two acquaintances to stage the attack and was a victim of nothing besides his own misguided agenda.

Is Israel a Jewish state, or is it just a state of Jews? Just how Jewish can a state be without interfering with its core democratic ideals? Does a Jewish state necessarily mean a religious state? These are the sorts of questions that Jews around the world have been asking themselves since the modern state of Israel evolved from dream to reality. The questions are complicated; the answers more so. In the last few days, these questions have been given renewed importance and urgency.  The answers have inspired deep fissures within the state of Israel and within the broader Jewish community. This Monday marked 25 years since Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist, entered the cave of the Patriarchs and shot up a room full of Muslims at prayer.