On Thursday, January 23, concerned community members attended the latest quarterly meeting of the Franklin County Investment Advisory Committee (IAC) to challenge Treasurer Cheryl Brooks Sullivan’s investments of taxpayer money into the State of Israel. The high stakes meeting was the last before $5 million dollars in Israel Bonds mature on February 1. Historically, the treasurer has used money repaid upon maturity to swiftly repurchase new Israel Bonds.

Far west of Columbus past 270, there are homeowners who see drones. In the skies above the prairie, between two massive metro parks, near the Big Darby River, and close to a very guarded scientific research complex that is connected to the Roswell UFO crash. Nearly every night they can be seen. And, in some instances, these drones look to be the size of a small house, they claim.

Not wanting to be identified, these homeowners live in what some describe as “country mansions.” Successful and trustworthy, one of these homeowners is a former Ohio State varsity athlete.

This individual leaves before dawn to workout at a nearby gym. He sent the Free Press the above picture top left. Albeit an obscure image, it was taken in 2023 – and whatever that is – it swooped in over his car while he was driving to his gym. Just last week near the same area he took a video of two drones flying together. Another of his videos shows a drone descending out of the night sky at an alarming speed.

“I keep seeing the same one,” he said. “Perhaps your city lights are too bright to see it.”

Allies were arrested in NYC after staging peaceful sit-in to support union baristas' fight for a contract.

Why are we doing this now? It’s been more than three years since baristas in Buffalo like me won their union and ignited a movement. It’s time for Starbucks to come back to the table with a fair contract offer so we can finalize a framework for contracts and focus on the future.

Starbucks needs to listen to us. Starbucks paid their new CEO Brian Niccol over $96 million in just four months and gave him a private jet to commute to work in Seattle. Then the company turned around and offered baristas no raises or benefits increases in the first year of our union contracts. Are you kidding me? And to top it all off they proposed closing this store in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, we’re struggling to keep up with rising costs — rent, food, bills — here in Brooklyn and all over the country. Our union has filed more than 90 unfair labor practice charges in January alone.

The dominant self-conception of the Jewish story is innocence, repeated persecutions, and then redemption by creation of the Jewish nationalist State of Israel.

This narrative is critically examined in Peter Beinart's new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.

Beinart's book says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel's agency in creating the resistance it faces:

“We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims.”

Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, is now an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, and a New York Times contributor.

He has been in a 20-year progression of seeing, more and more sharply, the “Jewish and democratic” state of Israel as anti-democratic and incompatible with Jewish tradition.

He writes that support for a Jewish state has become “idolatry,” permitting endless killing, torture and oppression of Palestinians: