Shammai Engelmayer

1 week ago | jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com | Shammai Engelmayer |Deb Herman

If they gave out an award for the sickest April Fool’s joke, the current White House crowd most certainly would be among this year’s finalists, if not the winners. April 1, of course, is April Fool’s Day, but it is also a day on which all manner of formally recognized annual month-long civic observances are presidentially proclaimed — observances only a fool would turn his or her back on.

3 weeks ago | jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com | Shammai Engelmayer |Deb Herman

Our republican democracy — “the Great Experiment,” as the French political thinker Count Alexis de Tocqueville dubbed it — may soon be “the Great Experiment That Failed” because the foundational document that set this “experiment” in motion — the Constitution of the United States — is being sabotaged from within. Passover is approaching, and it brings with it a challenge: What are we going to do about it? And I do mean we.

1 month ago | jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com | Shammai Engelmayer |Deb Herman

Whenever the world’s media report on Israel’s Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich or its former National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, one item on each of them stands out for all to see: the kippot they wear on their heads. I imagine that, like me, neither of them is even conscious of putting on a kippah. It is simply second nature to us. To the outside world, however, those kippot symbolize Judaism and its core beliefs, because observant Jews wear them.

1 month ago | jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com | Shammai Engelmayer |Deb Herman

Among the scariest developments coming out of Washington these days are Elon Musk using his chainsaw on our nation’s health system and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., beginning to implement the dangerous plans he has for the Department of Health and Human Services he now heads. Both men are putting the health of everyone in our nation, children’s health especially, at serious risk — Kennedy more so than Musk.

1 month ago | jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com | Shammai Engelmayer |Deb Herman

Several hundred people from communities in and around Tenafly, some draped in Israeli flags, gathered outside Café Angelique in the borough’s town center at 5 p.m. on Sunday to mourn the deaths of Shiri Bibas, her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, and the 84-year-old retired journalist and peace activist Oded Lifshitz, whose mutilated bodies were returned to Israel over the last few days. The four were taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and later were murdered by their captors.