FOR COUNTLESS JEWS, the Passover Seder this year will be a distressingly unfamiliar experience. There will be no relatives flying in from out of town, no host families with whom to share the meal and its rituals, no group Seders at the campus Hillel or local Chabad House, no catered Seder in a resort hotel. The irreplaceable felicity of connection — the joining with extended family, friends, or even strangers that has always been so integral to the Passover meal — will be absent.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

SECRETARY OF STATE Mike Pompeo on Monday endorsed observer status for Taiwan at the World Health Organization, pledging that he and the State Department will "do our best" to advocate Taiwan's participation in WHO meetings. With the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic approaching 40,000 and climbing steeply, Taiwanese involvement in the world's foremost public health agency ought to be a no-brainer — not just because the island is home to 24 million people, but also because it was one of the first to confront the new disease, and has been highly successful in fighting it.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

OUR HEALTH CARE system will eventually recover from the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. Our economy will recover too, notwithstanding the beating it is taking now.

Will our civil liberties recover?

Countless Americans are rightly alarmed by COVID-19 and the threat it poses to public health. Tens of millions are stunned by the abrupt wreckage of their businesses, livelihoods, and financial plans. An important debate is underway about how much economic pain can be justified by the need to suppress the infection. But where is the debate about the toll being taken on Americans' freedom and constitutional liberties by the unprecedented strictures that have been imposed to keep people apart?

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

JOE BIDEN IS in an awkward position. Whatever your politics, it is hard not to sympathize with his plight.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

HALF A CENTURY ago the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution seemed like a good idea. Such a good idea, in fact, that it was adopted by an overwhelming vote of 354-24 in the US House of Representatives and by an equally lopsided 84-8 in the Senate five months later.

Those votes easily surmounted the Constitution's requirement that an amendment win two-thirds support in each house of Congress, so on March 22, 1972 — 48 years ago this Sunday — the ERA was submitted to the state legislatures for ratification. If three-fourths (38) of the states approved the amendment within the specified seven-year deadline, the ERA would be added to the Constitution.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles