For a few fleeting days this past week, some much-needed Jewish unity was in the air. As Israel reeled from the Meron disaster on Lag Ba'omer that claimed 45 precious souls, the highly rare yet immensely valuable commodity of Jewish communal solidarity was readily on display.

Over and over again, the same refrains were uttered: "We must unite," "We all share the same fate" and "We must learn to live together with one another despite our differences."

As refreshing as it is to hear such sentiments, we all need to ask ourselves a blunt yet pressing question: Why does it take a catastrophe, war or a pandemic to bring us together?

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Antisemitism may be the world's oldest hatred but it's still a long way from death's door. What I find particularly distressing, if not surprising, is to see self-proclaimed human rights activists demonizing the world's most frequently threatened Jewish community.

I'm speaking, of course, about Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental – but not non-ideological – organization that has just published a 213-page report, "A Threshold Crossed," declaring its "finding" that Israel is committing "crimes of apartheid," which it calls "crimes against humanity" which, it adds, "should trigger action."

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During its time in office, the Trump administration elevated the concept of a strategic contest with the People's Republic of China (PRC), as well as with Russia, to a central role in its foreign policy, codifying it into multiple strategic documents and national-level directives. That focus has since been embraced by the Biden administration as well, which appears to have understood the need for a "long term" strategy against Beijing. This unfolding tug-of-war naturally has enormous implications for America's allies, all of whom have contacts with both nations. In recent years, many of these countries have attempted to balance the two relationships, with varying degrees of success. Even so, for some, such a balancing act is becoming more and more difficult to maintain. Morocco provides a case in point. Despite its historic political ties to Washington, the Kingdom has assiduously tried to avoid entanglement in what it views as a bilateral U.S.-Chinese strategic contest. At times, officials have even gone so far as to joke that Morocco should revive the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War era as a way of avoiding having to make the difficult choice between Washington and Beijing. Rabat's anxiety is especially understandable given China's growing economic activism in Africa generally, and its sustained investments in recent years in Morocco in particular. Yet the Kingdom's broader economic strategy is very clearly pulling it in the opposite direction.

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New York City's problems make for depressing front-page news. More than 11 percent of its jobs have vanished. Small shops are shuttered. Residents are fleeing. The city's tax base has shrunk, just as its needs and crime rates soar. The celebrated melting pot is no longer melting. Over 30 percent of city residents receive public assistance. The mayor tries hiding New York's dire fiscal straits, including its dwindling economic base and rising taxes, through accounting shenanigans, as the city's deficit and long-term debt spiral.

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Former senator, ambassador to Japan, and Vice President Walter Mondale died on April 19 at the age of 93. His obituaries have highlighted the fact of his landslide loss to President Ronald Reagan in 1984 but without dwelling on the larger lesson of Mondale's attempts at centrism and big-tent liberalism, presenting an incomplete picture of the alternate path the Democratic Party might have followed.

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Four major European and American apparel and footwear manufacturers have been sued in a French court for allegedly using forced labor in Xinjiang, a mostly Muslim region in northwestern China.

Human rights groups, academic researchers and journalists have increasingly been sounding the alarm that the Chinese government is forcing more than 500,000 Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic and religious minorities to pick cotton in Xinjiang, one of the largest cotton-producing regions in the world.

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The Biden administration says it intends to engage less in the Middle East. Several senior officials and surrogates repeated this point during the new presidency's first 100 days. Yet the administration went out of its way in its first few weeks to make three consequential moves in the Middle East that may backfire on America for years to come.

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In 2016, following major attacks targeting Jewish and Israeli targets around the world, and based on earlier text adopted by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, the government-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) published a two-page working definition of anti-Semitism. This initiative was designed to fill the vacuum that fostered ineffective policies and willful blindness in countering the sources of hate crimes directed specifically at Jews.

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Even as the amazingly fast development of new high-tech COVID-19 vaccines enthralls the world, a simple piece of fabric has become the surprise emblem of the fight against one of the worst health crises in the nation's history. The ordinary facemask has brought home a basic truth about public and personal health: simple and smart works.

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The deadly Wuhan Coronavirus, dubbed "2019-nCoV" by the World Health Organization (WHO), is spreading farther and faster than the SARS virus (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) did at a similar point in its outbreak, although this corona virus' lethality rate is still lower than for SARS at around 4% so far. The pathogens are the same — both are corona viruses — but something has changed with the Wuhan variant that has allowed the rate of transmission to increase significantly over SARS.

Despite the rapid spread of cases both within China and globally over the last weeks, however, the WHO so far has not declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

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Matthew RJ Brodsky joins Executive Director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, Halie Soifer on i24News special coverage of Joe Biden's inauguration.

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