Opinion

Bart Giamatti, the former President of Yale University who would go on to become the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, was once the guest speaker at the dinner of a major Jewish organization. The guests of honor were the members of the New York City Board of Estimate, which at the time consisted of the Mayor, the President of the City Council, the City Comptroller, and the five Borough Presidents. In his remarks, Professor Giamatti quoted a mishnah from this week’s chapter of Pirkei Avos: “Pray for the welfare of the ruling authorities, for if it were not for the fear of it, each man would eat his friend alive.” Later in the evening, Claire Shulman, the Queens Borough President, replied, “Bart, the problem with what you said is that the people on this stage eat each other alive every day.” Professor Giamatti and Borough President Shulman actually represented different approaches to this mishnah.

The number of COVID-19 cases is soaring across the country. Yet in these trying times, it is clear that there is so much more than a virus that is wrong with America.

With the rise in crime in and around New York City, the Queens Jewish community is growing more and more concerned with the direction the city has been taking regarding criminal justice reform and the relationship with the police. Some of these measures included ending cash bail, closing Rikers Island, and creating community jails closer to the courthouse. Councilman Rory Lancman, who represents the 24^th City Council district (which covers Kew Gardens Hills, Fresh Meadows, Hillcrest, Jamaica Estates, Briarwood, and more), has been a strong advocate for much of these policy changes.

This past Sunday, a massive gathering of police supporters rallied in Crocheron Park in Bayside under the banner of Blue Lives Matter, a movement of police supporters countering the apparent political momentum for defunding and constraining the ability of police officers to arrest individuals.

This week, in a visit to Walter Reed Medical Center, President Donald Trump was photographed and videoed wearing a mask. The reaction by members of the media is just an example of a media that is no longer hiding its bias. The masks of media objectivity are off, and continuously exposing this is Trump’s best road to re-election.

This past week saw a massive surge in the defamation, desecration, and destruction of the history of the United States of America. The ire of the mob is no longer limited to protesting police brutality or Confederate statues – perhaps it never was. The goal of the far-left is to burn down the country and hope that from the ashes a better system somehow emerges. Few, if any, of our elected leaders seem to have the political will to stop them.