Here he is on the night of July 19: “The Jewish people have been chased out of almost every country on this planet,” he told a crowd of thousands at the annual Christians United for Israel gathering in Washington. “This is why the nation of Israel is vital.”

And here he less than a week later, speaking July 25 on his syndicated radio show, broadcast on 400 stations, describing the July 22 massacre in Norway of dozens of teenagers at a Labor Party summer camp: “There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth,” he said. “I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing.”

The statement about Israel earned Beck plaudits from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, in a column he wrote for The Jerusalem Post. “I sat there thinking, if only the Jewish community could offer such unequivocal support for Israel,” Boteach said.

Boteach is hardly alone. Beck earned a rapturous reception when he appeared earlier this month before the Knesset committee dealing with Diaspora affairs and immigration, and he is planning a mass rally in Jerusalem on Aug. 24.

“We tend to give up and be hopeless,” Likud’s Danny Danon, a settler leader and the Knesset committee chairman who proffered the invitation to Beck, told JTA. “And it’s heartening to see Glenn Beck and his show winning the battle.”

Mort Zuckerman, the New York publishing magnate and a past chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella foreign policy group, wrote Beck to praise him for his rally plans.

“I am happy to support your efforts to explain why today more than ever we need people who are willing to stand with Israel and people who can explain Israel’s unique position in the history of the world,” Zuckerman wrote.

A number of liberal groups in the United States have opposed the rally as exploitative.

The statement about the massacre, likening the slaughtered Norwegian teens to Nazis, also produced Jewish comment.

“He’s back!” Dana Milbank, a Jewish columnist for The Washington Post, posted on Twitter, with a link to the audio. Milbank is the author of Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America, which alleges that Beck’s theories are rooted in conspiratorial anti-Semitism.

Both of Beck’s statements are rooted in the overarching theory he peddles on his radio show — that despotic movements, like communism, fascism and Islamism, continue to seek world domination, and that they have tentacles inside the establishment reaching as far as the White House.

Beck’s speech at CUFI conflated the threats Jews faced in Nazi Germany with his familiar rhetoric about the threats posed by big government. “You cannot break down people’s doors and snatch them,” he said. “All of us have a right to practice peacefully our religion, to raise a family and to use our God-given talent” to start businesses.

Milbank, who launched a campaign in his column to keep prominent Jews from joining Beck onstage in Jerusalem, says such talk is rooted in a conspiratorial mindset that has never been good news for the Jews. He notes that some of the books Beck urges his followers to read contain ancient tropes about Jewish domination and control.

Writing in The Washington Post, Milbank outlined a greatest-hits list of Beck’s offenses: “Hosting a guest on his show who describes as ‘accurate’ the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ likening Reform rabbis to ‘radicalized Islam’; calling Holocaust survivor George Soros a ‘puppet master,’ a bloodsucker and a Nazi collaborator; touting the work of a Nazi sympathizer who referred to Eisenhower as ‘Ike the Kike’; and claiming the Jews killed Jesus.”

Such lists are ripped from context, David Brog, CUFI’s Jewish director, wrote in a counterattack on the conservative website the Daily Caller, and they ignore Beck’s efforts to shine a light on Israel’s delegitimization, which Brog characterized as the new anti-Semitism.

“Beck has not only recognized the threat of this new anti-Semitism, but he’s become a leading opponent of it,” Brog said. “How often do cable news shows devote entire episodes to such ratings busters as reviewing the history of anti-Semitism, with a special focus on Christian anti-Semitism, or interviewing Holocaust survivors?”

Beck declined an interview for this story, but his aides provided background on his friendliness to Jewish groups, dating back to February 2008, when he spoke at a fund-raising event for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Such appearances have proliferated recently, but so have the contretemps between Beck and the Jewish establishment, which tend to follow a pattern: He offends by likening Jews who promote social justice to Nazis or by likening Reform rabbis to Islamists. Then he apologizes, and then he offends again.

Beck’s supporters point to his devoting two episodes of his recently retired TV show on Fox News Channel to the March 11 murder of five members of the Udi Fogel family in their home in the West Bank settlement of Itamar.

The Fogel murders occurred during the tsunami that hit Japan, and the American media devoted extensive resources to covering that tragedy.

Beck, Danon said, “was the only one in the media who gave the appropriate time and context to the massacre at Itamar.” The Likud lawmaker added that the intellectual company Beck keeps is less important than his fervent and sincere support for Israel.

“I care about the issue of Israel, and when you see the remarks and comments about Israel, you should be happy about it,” Danon said.

That certainly seemed to be the view of the CUFI activists, mostly Evangelical Christians, but also including certain invited guests, such as Boteach, who represent the Jewish community’s more conservative wing.

“We love you, Glenn Beck!” a man shouted out from the back of the hall during the CUFI gathering. Beck, who specializes in a self-deprecatory stance, retorted: “That’s somewhat disturbing coming from a man, but I mean, look at me, I’ll take it.”

He concluded his speech by appealing to the anti-Semites he had described: “Count me a Jew and come for me first.”

“Show me the Jews, I’m one,” he said and raised his hand.

So did hundreds of others deep in the cavernous Washington convention center. One woman draped herself in an Israeli flag, and ecstatically danced through the hall.

The Palestinian Authority is renewing an archaeology dig in Shechem, which the Bible records was bought by Jacob (Yaakov). The director  of the PA’s Department of Antiquities, Hamdan Taha, says the dig will help in “writing or rewriting the history of Palestine.”

Muslim clerics often have rewritten the Bible, claiming that the “binding of Isaac (Yitzchak)” actually refers to Ishmael. Clerics in the Palestinian Authority and the entire Muslim world also have frequently argued that the Holy Temples never existed and that Rachel’s Tomb at Bethlehem actually is an ancient Muslim holy site.

Shechem appears to be next in line. Taha told the Associated Press that the history of the area, including the Biblical period, is part of “Palestinian history.”

He added that the renewed dig of the Shechem site will “give Palestinians the opportunity to participate in writing or rewriting the history of Palestine from its primary sources.”

Indications of the thinking of mainstream media were evident in the AP report, which noted that “Abraham’s grandson Jacob was camped outside the walls when a local Canaanite prince raped his daughter, Dinah. Jacob’s sons sacked the city in vengeance. The body of Jacob’s son Joseph was brought from Egypt hundreds of years later by the fleeing Israelites and buried at Shechem.”

However, the most important element of the Biblical story was omitted – the purchase of Shechem by Jacob, making the city one of three Biblical sites bought for the Jewish people. The other two are the Patriarch’s Cave and surrounding fields in Hevron, purchased by Abraham, and the city of Jerusalem, purchased by King David.

The remains at the Tel Balata archeological site in Shechem show that there were huge gates at the entrance to the ancient city.

Work at the site began a century ago but was stopped with the onset of World War I.

The Bible is an “ancient holy book” that is irrelevant in the Palestinian Authority aim for all of Judea and Samaria, a PA activist says.

The Bible is an “ancient holy book” that is irrelevant to the Palestinian Authority’s aim to take over all of Judea and Samaria from the Jews, a PA activist said in a rare debate last week with a “settler” in a Washington synagogue.

The Bible is full of “medieval” traditions that should not be considered or influence decisions on whether or not to create the Palestinian Authority as an independent state within Israel’s borders, Dr. Hussein Ibish, Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, said in the debate with David Ha’Ivri, director of the Shomron (Samaria) Liaison Office.

His comment is at odds with Palestinian Authority Muslim clerics who claim that Jews have “stolen” the Temple Mount, Rachel’s Tomb  and other holy Jewish sites, which they say have no connection with Jews. The clerics have argued the sites’ alleged connections with Islam, a religion which did not exist in Biblical times and which was not founded until centuries after the Holy Temples were built and approximately 2,000 years after the matriarch Rachel died. The Koran has many excerpts from the Bible.

Ibish’s comments were in answer to Ha’Ivri’s statement that Jerusalem is mentioned over 800 times in the Bible and not at all in the Koran and that most of the Biblical narrative relates to events in Judea and Samaria.

The live debate on the subject “Palestinian State or Jewish Homeland?” came less than two  months before the Arab League is expected to ask the United Nations to recognize “Palestine” as an independent country based on the Arab world’s territorial and political demands, which deny recognizing Israel as a “Jewish” state.

Ibish, born in Lebanon and a self-described agnostic, has campaigned on American campuses as executive director of the American Task Force for Palestine. He co-authored an article in the Huffington Post last week claiming that the United Nations “Council failed to implement Resolution 181,” recommending the partition of Palestine into two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab.

According to Ibish’s account of history, the declaration of the re-establishment of Israel led to the “the intervention by five Arab armies in what was already a raging communal civil war in Palestine.

By all accounts, Arab forces waged war against Jews in Israel well before the United Nations Partition Plan and immediately attacked Jews afterwards.

Ibish’s article also avoided all mention of Arab terror when he described the “peace efforts” from the Oslo Accords in 1993 to the American Roadmap plan in 2003.

Archaeologists have discovered a rare gold bell with a small loop at its end. The finding was made during an archaeological excavation in the City of David National Park (near the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem) by the Israel Antiquities Authority in cooperation with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Ir David Foundation.

The directors of the excavation on behalf of the Antiquities Authority, archaeologists Eli Shukron and Professor Ronny Reich of Haifa University, said after the finding, “The bell looked as if it was sewn on the garment worn by a man of high authority in Jerusalem at the end of the Second Temple period.

“The bell was exposed in the city’s main drainage channel of that period, between the layers of dirt that had been piled on the floor of the channel,” they continued. “This drainage channel was built and hewn west to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount and drained the rainfall in the different parts of the city, through the City of David and the Shiloah Pool to the Kidron valley.”

The excavation area, above the drain, is located in the main street of Jerusalem which rose from the Shiloah Pool in the City of David. In this street an interchange was built through which people entered the Temple Mount. The remains of this interchange are what is known today as Robinson’s Arch. Archaeologists believe that the eminent man walked the streets of Jerusalem in the area of Robinson’s Arch and lost the golden bell which fell off his outfit into the drain beneath the street.

Jewish sources say that the high priests who served in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem used to hang golden bells on the edges of their coats. The book of Exodus (Shemot), for example, contains a description of the coat of Aaron the high priest in which it is said that coat contains, “bells of gold.”

While it is unknown if the bell belonged to one of the high priests, archaeologists have not ruled out the possibility.

Following rabbinic precedent, another avenue for recreating the Temple was to identify acts that could be considered parallel to Temple service.

The Temple is part of Jewish collective memory; alas, it is a distant memory. For many of us, it is challenging to connect to the hazy narrative of the Temple. To be sure, we continue to learn its laws, mourn its destruction and regularly pray for it to be rebuilt, but it is not part of daily reality. Following rabbinic tradition, hassidic masters sought to recreate the Temple experience in a variety of forms.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of Opatow (the Ohev Yisrael, 1748- 1825) was keenly aware of his previous incarnations, one of which was as kohen gadol (high priest) in the Temple. Part of the Yom Kippur service recounts the kohen gadol’s service in the Temple on this holiest of days. When the Ohev Yisrael was leading this service on Yom Kippur, he was heard saying: “And thus I used to say” – instead of the standard text, “And thus he used to say” – because he still remembered the time he served as high priest. Thus, for the Ohev Yisrael, the Temple was not merely collective memory; it was a personal memory, and he was prepared to publicly share that vignette.

In another case, Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum of Ujhel (the Yismah Moshe, 1759-1841) finished the silent amida prayer and recalled the rabbinic tradition that the Temple in heaven was not destroyed and that sacrifices are being offered there even today. He thought to himself that he should pray to see that sight, and God granted his request. The Yismah Moshe then saw with his own eyes Elijah the Prophet dressed in the priestly garments, standing there and offering up the daily sacrifice. For the Yismah Moshe as well, it was not a distant memory, but the real heavenly Temple – an image of the earthly Temple, accessible only by mystical experience. This matter also became public knowledge.

Following rabbinic precedent, another avenue for recreating the Temple was to identify acts that could be considered parallel to Temple service.

Thus, for instance, Rabbi Nahman of Breslov (1772-1810) declared that “the money given for the benefit of the tzadik [righteous person] is considered as if the giver served in the Temple service.” Or in a mystical vein: “The ‘clear-sighted’ are able to perceive the halafim [slaughter knives] of the shohtim [ritual slaughterers] as vessels of the Temple.”

Another hassidic master, Rabbi Uri of Strelisk (1757-1826) described the experience of coming to visit the the Hozeh (Seer) of Lublin, Rabbi Ya’acov Yitzhak Halevi Horowitz (1745-1815), in terms of a visit to the Temple: “When coming to Lublin, a person should imagine that the city is the Land of Israel, and the courtyard of the beit midrash [Torah study hall] is Jerusalem, and the beit midrash the Temple Mount, and the apartment [that is, the house of our master] the antechamber, and the sanctuary – the Holy Chamber, and his room is the Holy of Holies, and the Divine Presence speaks from his throat.” Rabbi Uri concluded that once this was fathomed, the visitor “will understand who our master is.”

Of course, sacred space in general and comparing special sites to the Temple is not the purview of hassidism alone. In his memoirs, Rabbi Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan, 1880-1949) recalled the 1886 fire that destroyed his home town of Volozhin: “Suddenly it became apparent that the fire had taken hold of the roof of the yeshiva building” – referring to the famous Etz Hayim Yeshiva founded in 1807. “The whole crowd sounded a great and bitter cry: ‘Oy vey, the Temple is burning.’ There was no one – not a learned person nor a simple Jew – whose eyes did not cry. Some cried quietly, some loudly, but everyone cried; everyone called out: ‘Oy vey, the Temple is burning,’ ‘The holy yeshiva is amidst the flames.’ Children that were looking for food, Jews who had just been moaning about their homes and property that had been destroyed, all of them forgot what they had just been busy with; there was only one groan, one cry: ‘The Temple is burning,’ ‘The yeshiva is amidst the flames’…”

The Temple may have been a distant collective memory, but virtual substitutes were recreated in hassidic thought. It should be recalled, however, that while individual mystical experiences, communal perceptions of sacred space and symbolic acts representing Temple rites could temporarily replace the Temple of old, the longing for the rebuilt Temple was never excised from the liturgy or from Jewish consciousness by the hassidic masters who found such replacements.