Letters

I cannot praise The Jewish Week enough for your sensitive, comprehensive, intelligent coverage of Mayor Ed Koch (Feb. 1 issue). What most impressed me were your reports of his public pride in being Jewish and his “special pride in Israel.” 

It was in the spring of 1983 that the bullets began to rain down on Yeshiva University’s Washington Heights Campus. I had just walked by Furst Hall, the main classroom and administrative building when a drive-by shooter pierced its wide glass-door entrance with the first volley of bullets. Other incidents were to follow in and around our urban campus, putting Yeshiva on high alert. The response by the NYPD was swift and pervasive.

Douglas Bloomfield, on the Political Insider blog, mentions the ZOA as among those organizations “which can be counted upon to oppose virtually anything the Obama administration does in the Middle East” (“Obama’s Farm Team,” Jan. 25).

The picture this week of Egypt’s President Morsi greeting Iranian President Ahmadinejad as he disembarked at Cairo airport for the first visit to Egypt by Iranian head of state since 1979 is frightening (“Amadinejad Visits Cairo, Says He’d Like To Go To Gaza,” on thejewishweek.com).

We were pleased and proud to see Shimon Solomon featured in The Jewish Week (“The New Faces of the 19th Knesset,” JTA story, Jan. 29).

In the Jan. 11 issue, Steve Greenberg’s cartoon makes a very ironic point.

Julie Weiner’s insightful article (“For Jewish Education Reform, A ‘Very Messy Period’”, Jan 29, 2013) on the challenges facing many national agencies today highlights the discussions between The Jewish Education Project and JESNA concerning how we might combine assets to benefit Jewish education in New York and nationally.

In the first paragraph of his column, “Sharansky’s Mission Impossible” (Jan. 25), Gary Rosenblatt describes the traditionalists as opposing women’s prayer services at The Wall “on religious grounds.” He doesn’t credit Women of the Wall with wanting to daven at the holiest place in Judaism as having religious reasons. Both sides have both political and religious reasons for their positions.

Regarding “Sharansky’s Mission Impossible” (Editor’s column, Jan. 25), in Tel Aviv, where secularism dominates, nobody objects to also having single-sex beach areas

We need an area of the Western Wall, a place that would be and feel like part of the “real” Western Wall,” where women and men could pray together with completely equal religious rights.

I was delighted to read “Cornel West Trumpeting Heschel’s Prophetic Vision,” Jan. 25.