NEW: AVID READERS RECOMMEND: suggest your must-reads ~ PLUS SCROLL DOWN TO READ 6 MORE NEW AUGUST STORIES, scroll down past the 12 Community Supporter Advertisers
by New Mexico Jewish Journal
Beginning with our August, 2025 issue, we have a new feature, Avid Readers Recommend. Paid subscribers only may submit, by email, links to published articles from known credible, trustworthy, publications that they very much want other NMJJ readers to see. If the link is behind a paywall, include a cogent excerpt. NMJJ may, at their discretion, publish those here. Here are our first selected submissions:
- Avid Reader, from Colorado, writing that the podcast "Israel's Moral Balance Beam" (New York Times, 7/10/25) offers a helpful point of view about half-way through the 45 minute interview, in response to the question "Can you criticize Israel without being antisemitic?," and submitted this excerpt. The podcast is with Bret Stephens, NYT contributor and editor of Sapir Magazine.
"Stephens: Of course you can. And this is one of the points that I tear my hair out. Look, you want to see the most acerbic criticism of Israel? Go to the Haaretz website — the leading Israeli paper. Israelis criticize Israeli politics all the time when it comes to every issue imaginable. There are no sacred cows, there are no red lines. In fact, some of the most strident anti-Zionist voices will often refer to Israelis writing in Haaretz to wash themselves of accusations of antisemitism.
But let me just make this baseline point, because, again, criticism of Israeli policy can be mistaken, but it’s always legitimate. But anti-Zionism is not criticism solely of Israeli policy. Anti-Zionism is criticism of the existence of the state of Israel, as a state that has the right to exist.
So it’s a little bit different, but if people hate Donald Trump, by all means, hate Donald Trump. But that doesn’t make you anti-American. It doesn’t make you want to destroy the United States because you can’t stand the policies of the Trump administration. Anti-Zionism is the belief that a Jewish state does not have a right to exist."
from: Opinion | Israel’s Moral Balance Beam - The New York Times
- Avid Reader, a doctor from Denver, Colorado, submitted this health piece from the Harvard Gazette, "Eating citrus may lower depression risk" by correspondent Saima Sidik, which recommends eating an orange a day. "Physician-researcher outlines gut-brain clues behind ‘orange a day’ finding. New findings add another dimension to “gut feelings.”:
"Eating an orange a day may lower a person’s depression risk by 20 percent, according to a study led by Raaj Mehta, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. That might be because citrus stimulates growth of Faecalibacterium prausnitzii (F. prausnitzii), a type of bacteria found in the human gut, to influence production of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine — two biological molecules known to elevate mood. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Mehta discusses key takeaways from the study ..." READ FURTHER. (Feb. 2025)
- Avid Reader, from Corrales, NM, shares this opinion piece by Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T'ruach, a rabbinic human rights organization representing over 2,300 rabbis and cantors and their communities in North America, that appeared in The Forward on July 23rd, titled "Gaza is starving. Where are the American Jewish leaders?" with the subhed: "Privately, Jewish lay leaders are anguished over Gaza. Publicly, they fear being labelled antisemitic."
- Avid Reader, Santa fe, with the comment, "Omg. Things are worse than I thought!," shares this story about how the billionaire who put Vance in as VP has the government contract to create centralized data records on everyone, from The Guardian, "Peter Thiel's Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans."
Robert Reich
- Avid Reader, Albuquerque, shares excerpt of NYT podcast "Project 2025's Other Project" that explains how Project Esther, the apparent architect of Trump's attacks on universities for antisemitism, has a bigger agenda:
Podcast excerpt:
"katie jm baker Yeah, the document is really about a fundamental distrust of higher education in particular. Victoria Coates has long spoken about why she left higher education and how there’s this noxious anti-Western worldview that’s pervasive within it. And most of their suggestions have to do with college campuses. And for years, Heritage has been railing against college campuses and saying that they’re hotbeds of progressivism. So they were able to fold this fight against anti-Semitism into this larger worldview that they have.
rachel abrams To put it another way, it feels like this document is about Jews, but it’s not actually for the benefit of Jews.
katie jm baker I think it was best stated in an open letter from three dozen former leaders of major Jewish establishment groups. I’m just going to read from the letter. So they warn that, and I quote, “A range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech, and the press.”
And the letter called on Jewish leaders and organizations to, quote, "resist the exploitation of Jewish fears and publicly join with other organizations that are battling to preserve the guardrails of democracy." In other words, what Project Esther has done is take a real concern about anti-Semitism, and then figured out a way to take that concern and achieve many other goals that Heritage has. ...
There are surely people who are part of this effort who genuinely care about violence against Jewish people. And there have been examples of violence in the US targeting Jewish people, some of them deadly. But Project Esther isn’t just talking about eliminating threats of or acts of violence against Jews, which do happen. They’re going much further than that. And anti-Semitism is being used as a tool here by the Trump administration to demonize an entire movement and execute a much, much broader agenda that has very little to do with protecting Jewish people."
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Where the North Ends, A Novel by Hugo Moreno
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