I wrote two political letters this morning - as a retired country gentleman, who now teaches at the university, and writes books.

In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize!

We are living in an America in which an Orthodox Jew was the ambassador to Cairo and kept a kosher home. America now, on Yom Kippur, semi-shuts down, including government, because so many of the administrative assistants are Jewish.

The President gives Prayer Breakfasts. He almost invariably has at them, from the Jewish community, the most Orthodox hard-line rabbis he can find, or that can be found for him. The liberals are under-represented, or not represented at all.

I have never been a dove because I'm some kind of woolly-eyed liberal. I have been a dove from the very early period, because I recognized that the Palestinians weren't going to go away, and they weren't going to remain passive. And all of these predictions were correct. And we'd better now act on them and make peace.

Do the Americans want democracy in the Middle East? Do the Americans want the oil wells of Iraq and of Saudi Arabia controlled by regimes which are revolutionary, and which are Islamic fundamentalist? Mr. Bush wants that like he wants a hole in the head.

I don't know where Bush is going - yet. But, Sharon obviously - I wrote somewhere in the last several months, that Sharon has adopted, essentially, the position of the Labor Party: that the Palestinians are here to stay.

What are you going to do to preserve a tradition that is the peculiar and unique culture that Judaism inculcates? The American Jewish community is not going to survive by lining up against its common enemy.

Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.