Ambassador David Friedman has long stepped down from his duties as the 20^th U.S. Ambassador to Israel following President Biden’s defeat of President Donald Trump in November 2020. However, Ambassador Friedman leaves an incredible legacy as one of the most consequential U.S. ambassadors to Israel.

This year, Ambassador Friedman published a memoir titled Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East, which documents his experience as Ambassador to Israel under President Trump and is quite a fascinating read. A remarkable 10,000-plus copies were sold in its first week of publication. According to Eric Nelson, Vice-President and Editorial Director of Broadside Books, the publisher of Friedman’s memoir, “It was the biggest first week of sales in Bookscan for a book about Israel in nearly 10 years.”

Drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed in recent years, and our political leaders are taking note. In August, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency, allowing the executive branch to earmark funds for the expansion of treatment facilities.

While chemical dependency is certainly not a new phenomenon in this country, the National Center for Health Statistics’ newly-released report revealed a very alarming trend that we have not seen before: In 2016, there were approximately 64,000 drug overdose deaths. About 20,100 of the deaths were caused by the lethal chemical fentanyl. Heroin was not far behind, with roughly 15,400 people losing their lives to heroin addiction. Maryland is one of three states that have reported the largest rise in drug overdose deaths.

Over 10,000 activists from across the country poured into the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Prince George’s County on February 22-25, 2017, for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The conference, which is sponsored by the American Conservative Union (ACU), is held at the site annually. CPAC, established in 1973, is the premier gathering of the conservative political movement. This year’s conference had all of the notable names in conservative politics in attendance, such as Senator Ted Cruz, Ambassador John Bolton, Vice-President Pence, and even President Trump. It marked the first time a sitting president addressed the

After Rosh Hashanah ended, I checked my emails, as I always do after a Shabbos or holiday, to find out what I missed during the two-day Yom Tov of restricted access to the outside world. I was rather shocked to receive an email dated October 3, 2016 from Governor Hogan’s press secretary asking me, “Can you come to the State House in Annapolis for a 15- to 20-minute in-person interview with the Governor this Friday, October 7, at 2 p.m.?” You may ask why I was surprised to receive this email. Precisely, it is because I had been requesting an interview with Governor Hogan since early August for the September edition of the WWW. However, the Governor’s staff informed me that he would not be available for an interview until some time in October, which led me to believe that perhaps the interview would never take place. I later learned that Governor Hogan was preparing to travel to Israel on a trade mission in September, which had not yet been made public. The Governor’s staff wanted to schedule the interview with the WWW for after his return from Israel so that he could discuss the highlights of the trade mission during the interview.