America's Real War

Rating:
Summary: Climb aboard or sink into darkness!
Review: This is an intimate look into the beliefs of a great American. Rabbi Lapin is a man of moral vision. He shows us where we have been and why we are now in distress as a nation.

The following was written this way because the author loves sailing....

Through Daniel Lapin's writing, he reminds us to not always follow all our baser instincts and encourages family values - you will want to keep sailing along with him through the passage of "Present Danger" and then the sea of "Have we gone to far."

While sitting at the round table on his expertly crafted ship, we see America sailing right on past. She is unaware of her fate as she sails faster and faster and fades from sight.

The water becomes colder and deeper and issues start emerging one by one: prayer in school, communism, abortion, race issues, divorce, marriage, kosher laws and bigotry. Rabbi Daniel Lapin reaches overboard to save them from bobbing aimlessly in the ocean of ideas and puts all of them in perspective.

He rescues each one, placing them aboard his ship of moral thought and action. And then he sees America sinking like the Titanic. Not looking anywhere else for someone to save her, he sails alongside and sounds the warning.

He holds out quick lessons in each chapter to save those who wish to listen.

If we could all read and apply the principles in Americas Real War, truly living in America would be more fulfilling. Everyone in America should read a book by one of the most brilliant authors of all time.

Recently I moved and have not been able to listen to his radio show and I really miss it. I am waiting for them to put back audio streaming from kvi.com or else!

;>

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read For Americans
Review: This book is outstanding! I wish every high school student would be required to read this book! Daniel Lapin is right on the money with his evaluation of America, past, present, and possible future. I highly recommend this book for every American. [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Did you ever wonder why liberals think the way they do?
Review: Daniel Lapin goes right to the heart of liberals and explains almost on an issue for issue basis how and why liberals think the way they do. He also helped me understand why so many secular Jews are liberal and toe the democratic party line. It seems that Ayn Rand was only half right. As any Ayn Rand fan will recall in, "Atlas shrugged" the lead Character, MRS Taggart came to the conclusion that liberals hated mankind. what Daniel Lapin argues, quite successfully, in "America's real war" is liberals reject God and therefor either consciously or subconsciously view mankind as an enemy of the earth, nature and himself.

Rating:
Summary: An exceptional book!
Review: I was intrigued by the author when I heard him discuss his book Dr. James Dobson's _Focus on the Family_ radio show. I purchased the book, and wasn't disappointed. He writes in an "easy to read" writing style. His tracing of the cause and effect of things reminds me somewhat of some of Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer's writings. If you are interested in the causes of America's decline and care enough about America to want to change things, then I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Our country is in a tug-of war.
Review: This book is an Orthodox rabbi's profoundly personal statement about the importance of Christian faith to the survival of American civilization. Precisely because I am a Jew, a religious leader, and a student of my people's history in its two millenia of exile, I felt compelled to write this book. We Jews have a religious obligation to acknowledge the good done to us--an obligation we have shamefully neglected. Indeed far too many Jewish leaders vilify religious Christians, even while accepting their support for Israel and other causes. Many Jews--including some of my dearest friends--feel threatened or insulted by the assertion that America is, and should be, a Christian nation. On the contrary, such a statement, with which I heartily agree, should be welcomed by Jews and all other minorities. No one is suggesting that Christian theology should in any way be imposed on Americans, and the Constitution would utterly forbid such an imposition. But in the realms of ethics (how we behave as individuals toward one another) and politics (how we order our lives together with one another), a great many well-meaning, patriotic Americans believe that we should find guidance in the Laws of Moses, and I am proud to stand among them. In this book I answer questions such as 1)Why are Jews so liberal? 2)Why political conservatism and free market capitalism depend on religious Faith. 3)Why anti-Semitism and racism are not bigger threats to America than sexual depravity.

I show that the underdog is not always noble and the poor are not automatically virtuous. Also that anti-Semitism is more of a political bludgeon to silence conservatives than a real threat to Jews today. I wrote this book in the sincere hope that it will not only be interesting but, more importantly, useful to you.

Rating:
Summary: Attacks on Christianity hazardous to the health of Judaism?
Review: Rabbi Daniel Lapin says yes, and argues that such attacks should stop: in his view, the U.S. is and should remain a _culturally_ Christian nation.

Christianity, he maintains, provides a proper basis for human liberty, a solid foundation for the free market, and (importantly) a place for Torah-true Judaism in American society. A secular culture can do none of these things.

Rabbi Lapin is under no illusion that there are no important theological differences between Judaism and Christianity; on the contrary, he knows full well that agreement on such matters is not strictly possible for those who remain faithful to their own traditions. However, as he is also at pains to show, Christianity incorporates enough principles of Mosaic law that Torah-observant Jews can feel safe in a Christian culture.

Not so a secular culture, he warns. Secularism is at present cruising on fuel it borrowed from Western religious tradition; once that fuel is exhausted, anything goes.

Many theologically liberal Jews have therefore, in Rabbi Lapin's view, been fighting the wrong enemy. The real foe is not "anti-Semitism"; it is irreligion. Whatever their theological differences, Christianity and Judaism should be brothers in arms in the fight for America's culture.

Agree or disagree, Rabbi Lapin's case is solidly mounted and strikingly put. His book should be read by anyone interested in the preservation of liberty.

Rating:
Summary: Check the facts, reviewer!
Review: A June 30, 1999 reviewer implied that most (not true) of our founding fathers were not Christian and cited the following as evidence of Washington's thoughts regarding our government and the Christian religion:

George Washington wrote in the Treaty if Tripoli, 1796:

"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion"

Interested readers should do as I did. I entered "treaty" + "tripoli" in altavista.digital.com and found only one reference to this work. If you scan the document you will find that something called the Barlow translation references this line which appears to have materialized from nowheres since it is not found in the original document. In other words, the previous reviewer got his information from a doctored translation.

In general, I found this book to be right on. My only complaint was that, like another review mentioned, it is not clear that the rabbi recognizes much (if any) Christian contribution to what he refers to as the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Rating:
Summary: Self-righteous bordering on hypocritical
Review: Rabbi Lapin's book comprises largely unsubstantiated assertions in the guise of fact and is so tendentious as to erode any hope of contributing to a thought provoking discussion of the issues it purports to address.

I didn't begin this book without first being aware of the author and his views. Being politically opposed on most issues, I read the book with the expectation that I would be engaged in a thoughtful discourse on the religious and spiritual grounds upon which this country was founded. Rather than being engaged, I was insulted. I was insulted by the assertion, implicit, if not explicit, throughout the book, that the survival of our country depends upon great Christian strength. Rabbi Lapin's argument that the Christian right generally supports issues that Jews ought to embrace is valid only to a point. On its face, there is no reason why Jews should oppose school prayer (after all, what religious person would oppose prayer?). Of course the issue is not so simple. Rabbi Lapin consistently fails to consider Christian motivations for school prayer by some members of the Right (a la Pat Buchanan who refers to Christianity as "the one true religion") and the impact motivations would have on the practice he advocates. Rabbi Lapin also conveniently avoids the issue of this country's woeful response to the Shoah during Roosevelt's administration when the State Department was run by people with the types of Christian values Rabbi Lapin finds so essential to this country. Let us not forget in the rush to embrace the Christian Right that we can hardly do so without losing a strong Jewish political identity. The failure of this country to open its borders to European Jews during the Shoah reflects a failure of American Jews to be heard and a failure of Christian conscience on a political level to identify with our problems. Rabbi Lapin wants to relegate Jews to the point of irrelevance and return to the days of yore, such as the 1940's when Gallup polls showed Jews to be the third most hated group in America behind only Germans and Japanese.

Rabbi Lapin's book could have been so much more if he had any respect for Jewish values and his Jewish identity.

Rating:
Summary: A Wise Voice of True Judaism
Review: The chattering classes would love to dismiss this book as the ranting of some right-wing Christian Fundamentalist Nut. Unfortunately for them, Daniel Lapin's title of "Rabbi" appears on the cover and his Orthodox Judaism is proudly evident throughout this insightful work.

The essence of the book is a common sense view of American history; Christianity was an essential component in the founding of the United States and an inarguable benefit up until the 1960's. This view would not be polemical were it not for the power that has been seized by radical revolutionaries in much of academia, the media, and the arts over the past 30+ years. The rabbi readily admits that this is not what much of intelligentsia wants to hear but courageously spells it all out, nonetheless.

Among his biggest pet peeves is the misplaced charge of anti-Semitism hurled at anyone who disagrees with the cockamamie spewing of any liberal with a Jewish sounding last name. He rightly questions the "Jewishness" of a person who hasn't set foot in a synagogue for years and wouldn't know the difference between the Talmud and the Veda. While rightly condemning the horror of true anti-Semitism, (after all he is an Orthodox Rabbi) Lapin points out that much of what currently earns that disgraceful categorization is in fact anti-liberalism. He cites a rabbi in Nebraska who compared a congressman's pro-life stand to the evil views of Hitler as though there was a direct correlation.

Perhaps his most controversial statements concern Judaism's teaching on homosexuality. While he argues that gay spokespeople often have Jewish names, and some of have gone far enough to slander the noble religion by lying that Jewish law does not condemn homosexuality, Rabbi Lapin lists several Old Testament and Talmud dictates clearly forbidding the practice. Furthermore he attacks the current putative myth that the Nazis regularly executed homosexuals. In fact he boldly points out, as well documented in the classic, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," many adherents of nazism-especially its founders--were in deed gay themselves. He relates one terribly moving, if daringly politically incorrect, tale of a recent roisterous appearance by a gay group at a holocaust memorial in Israel. One grandchild of victim shouted at the interlopers that his grandfather was murdered for refusing to have sex with a nazi. Factual yes, but not something that the diversity-gestapoes want us to hear.

Like many immigrants, his patriotism is willing displayed. To Lapin's thinking no country-other than Israel as ever been as good to the Jewish people as America, and he correctly attributes this to the Christian nature of the United States.

While the religious left (those who worship secularism) would rather pretend that Jews like Rabbi Lapin do not exist, he speaks for true Judaism. There is a strong message here. Those who distort Judaism to serve their own purposes are the counterparts of so-called 'gay churches" or others who flummox the teachings of Christianity, and neither group of vexatious iconoclasts should be allowed to speak for true believers.

Like Laura Schlessinger and Michael Medved (his long time friend and neighbor), the Rabbi is a popular talk show host and the three of them-along with a plethora of true practitioners of Judaism-are proving that valid Orthodox views are truly in sync with American idealism.

Rating:
Summary: SUPURB!
Review: Six Stars! Five is not enough