Joe Biden wants to give immigration reform a go. Good luck, Mr. President, but recent history is not on your side and the timing is questionable at best… Simply legalizing the status of these migrants—most of whom have been in the country for more than a decade—won’t solve the larger problem, which is the imbalance between the number of visas available and the number of foreigners who want them.

Immigration reform has stalled in Congress time and again, over border security, guest workers and whether to tackle legislation one piece at a time. But the big stumbling block remains whether providing amnesty to those who have broken the law will encourage more people to try their luck.

A Democratic president proposing an immigration overhaul to a Congress in which not even the Democrats are unified means this will be a long slog. But Congress must seize the moment.

The Trump administration didn’t exactly ignore the conflict. It’s more that they stopped idolizing it. Above all, they tried to avoid repeating the same tired tropes that have failed decade after decade.

Now, for better or worse, we’re back to those old tropes.

Shrinking the conflict does not require the Palestinians to sign a peace treaty or agree to terminate all claims. Instead, it promises to boost Palestinian autonomy, granting greater independence without forcing them to give up on their demand for the return of refugees, and without forcing them to recognize Israel.

It would be wise to know exactly what is the situation on the ground between Israel and the Palestinians. There needs to be a serious evaluation undertaken regarding the status of the Oslo agreements, measuring what the parties agreed to and what has or has not been implemented by both sides.

…the separation of Jews into “white-presenting” and “Jews of color,” a distinction that the critical ethnic studies paradigm requires Jews to adopt, does not emanate from Jewish culture or religion. We should not be compelled to conceive of ourselves in racial terms.

As the state awaits a final vote on California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum in a few short weeks, the controversy surrounding the educational plan has seized the Jewish community’s imagination — and its fears. Now is the time to take stock of our achievements and continuing challenges as a community, after 18 months of efficacious advocacy to eliminate anti-Jewish, anti-Israel content and for including Jewish narratives in the curriculum…

…Jews are the only group in the curriculum for whom the term “privilege” is used. And this privilege is not earned by way of talent, or educational and professional attainment, but rather trickery. The ESMC, echoing Nazi propaganda about Jews as impostors and appropriators hiding in plain sight, points out that American Jews often change their names (“this practice of name-changing continues to the present day”) to change their rank in the social hierarchy.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and tonight we welcome the holiday of Tu Bishvat, also known as the Jewish “birthday” of the trees.

The marriage of these two days is chilling. The six million souls murdered in the Holocaust were like individual human trees. Each had the potential to grow, to flourish and to bear fruit for generations.

Although addiction, or having a loved one with addiction, can feel lonely, we are certainly not alone… Tu Bishvat, a day for ecological awareness and tree planting, offers an opportunity to use nature, specifically trees, as a source of four ways to sustain growth in recovery.

With Tu Bishvat approaching, Jews around the world are planning to plant trees to commemorate the obligation to care for the natural world. Every year, masses of Israelis venture out and fulfill this responsibility by planting fresh seedlings throughout the country to symbolize renewal and growth.

There is a rich historical irony to the fact that today, conservatives are the ones who argue most forcefully that the decisions by private companies to “deplatform” certain speakers threaten what President Donald Trump described in 2020 as the “bedrock” American right to freedom of speech. Until very recently, this was an argument made almost exclusively by those on the left.

Many, perhaps most, Americans think it’s legal and praiseworthy to suppress “hate speech.” But hate speech, unless it directly and explicitly incites violence, is protected by the First Amendment under longstanding Supreme Court precedent.

…the issue is not left vs right. It’s right vs wrong. After years violating Twitter policy and posting dangerous rhetoric, Trump was finally stopped because the danger became too clear: Americans died because of his words. It’s not conservative principles that caused social media to take a stand. It’s violence, sedition, incitement.

The Reddit hoax-bubble has revealed the underlying myth of the entire enterprise. The more money people make from that enterprise, the more unpleasant it is to confront the myth.

The GameStop follies, it turns out, aren’t just a simple get-rich-quick scheme. This is a cry for help, combined with a way to even the score. If that doesn’t tell us something about our age of inequality, I don’t know what does.

Instead of greed, this latest bout of speculation, and especially the extraordinary excitement at GameStop, has a different emotional driver: anger. The people investing today are driven by righteous anger, about generational injustice, about what they see as the corruption and unfairness of the way banks were bailed out in 2008 without having to pay legal penalties later, and about lacerating poverty and inequality.