As tensions continue to rise in the Middle East, New Jersey’s members of the House of Representatives took action last last month to support Israel’s military superiority in the region and enforce sanctions against Iran.

Israel’s missile defense

The Appropriations Defense Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives has appropriated $217.7 million — the highest amount on record, according to Washington sources — in funding for joint U.S.-Israel missile defense programs. The appropriation — the highest on record for such projects, according to Washington sources — is $95.7 million more than the original request.

The decision by Israel to participate in the U.N. probe of the Turkish flotilla incident marks a stark departure from Jerusalem’s practice of opposing the world body’s investigations of Israeli actions.

A year and a half ago, faced with a similar decision when the U.N. Human Rights Council decided to appoint a fact-finding mission to investigate Israel and Hamas’ actions during the Gaza war, Israel boycotted the inquiry led by retired South African judge Richard Goldstone. Israel would pay a heavy diplomatic price: The Goldstone report was harshly critical of Israel and generated months of negative publicity for the Jewish state.

Is it possible that the first iconic Jewish picture of the decade is of an interfaith marriage?

Photographs taken Saturday show the Jewish groom wearing a yarmulke and a crumpled tallit staring into the eyes of his giddy bride under a traditional Jewish wedding canopy with a framed ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract, in the background.

The couple are Marc Mezvinsky, the banker son of two Jewish ex-members of Congress, and Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former U.S. president and current secretary of state.

JERUSALEM – In one of the more curious twists in Israeli politics, prominent figures on Israel’s right wing have begun pushing for a one-state solution with Israelis and Palestinians as equal citizens with full voting rights.

The one-state solution previously had been the preserve of the post-Zionist left, Palestinian hard-liners and left-leaning European intellectuals who envisioned turning Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza into a single state in which the Palestinians soon would become the majority and assume the reins of government.

For the overwhelming majority of Israelis, the idea has been anathema because it seemed to spell the end of the Zionist dream of a sovereign Jewish state.

The Anti-Defamation League released its annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents on
Tuesday — with a significant change from earlier years.

The organization is taking a more conservative approach to counting certain types of incidents, including graffiti and swastikas.

“We know that the swastika has, for some, lost its meaning as the primary symbol of Nazism and instead become a more generalized symbol of hate,” ADL National Director Abraham Foxman said. “So we are being more careful to include graffiti incidents that specifically target Jews or Jewish institutions as we continue the process of re-evaluating and redefining how we measure anti-Jewish incidents.”

The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States has declined since 1,352 were reported in 2008, but some of the decline was likely because of revised methodology for reporting and tracking incidents that was unveiled in the ’09 audit, the ADL said.

BEIT MEIR, ISRAEL – For four years now, Tzvika Poleyeff of Englewood has been praying for IDF Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, an Armored Corps soldier captured by Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip on June 25, 2006, and held hostage ever since.

But the plight of Shalit and his family took on a new dimension for Tzvika — a Torah Academy of Bergen County junior — when he and fellow campers in the National Conference of Synagogue Youth (Orthodox Union) Kollel program met Noam Shalit, the captive’s father. Shalit was at the head of a mass 12-day march at the beginning of July in support of efforts to release the soldier.

According to Teaneck native Rabbi Moshe Benovitz, the kollel director, the 150 high school boys and their counselors were emotionally overwhelmed by the experience.

During his more than 20 years as an Orthodox Jewish educator, Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot has heard many stories from friends and colleagues about the treatment of homosexuals in his movement.

“I haven’t done a systematic study, but I know anecdotally that there are some extremely sensitive rabbis,” he told The Jewish Standard.

But sometimes, he added, homosexual congregants or students “can’t be honest with their rabbis because of the nature of their orientation. They would have no place in their synagogue or school, or they hear hurtful things from the pulpit and see no future in the movement.”

Despite its name, the U.N. Human Rights Council has a deplorable human rights record, said Rep. Scott Garrett (R-5), who organized a bipartisan congressional letter to President Obama urging him to withdraw the United States from the council.

“It’s ignored human-rights violations,” Garrett told The Jewish Standard on Tuesday, shortly after he sent the letter. “We’ve seen in the past year in Iran there were allegations of brutality by the government toward its own people, killing their own people. That’s all ignored by the council.”