There was rarely a time when I saw Sheldon Adelson that I did not kiss him on the cheek in greeting, as he did the same in return. There was rarely a time when I greeted him, with my wife Debbie, that he did not tease her in some way as to the whereabouts of our nine children. And there was never a time when I called him every Friday to wish him "Shabbat Shalom" that he did not take the call, however busy, and warmly return the greeting.

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That was Sheldon Adelson. Corporate titan. Billionaire businessman. The world's foremost Jewish philanthropist. But through and through, the warmest man with the biggest heart.

Hearing the news today that Sheldon had passed way, even while I knew he had been ill, was shocking. How can a man who was larger than life have been snatched away by death? How could anything have conquered Sheldon Adelson, a living legend?

As the day progressed, I grew increasingly depressed and morose. My wife Debbie summed it up. "I can't believe that we're never going to see Sheldon again."

Neither can I.

Sheldon Adelson was an American colossus. A visionary who transformed Las Vegas and Macau into some of the most visited places on earth. Together with his wife Miri, he envisioned the re-creation of the world's most serene city, Venice, right in the sands of the Nevada desert. He dreamed big for Israel, believing that the United could and should recognize the tiny desert nation as its most important ally. By the time of his death, today at the age of 87, he had realized his dream. Only a Sheldon Adelson could have foreseen Israel rising as a global technological and intelligence superpower, becoming the most indispensable global friend of the United States of America.

And Sheldon was generous, a supernova of Jewish giving, earning his place among history's most legendary Jewish philanthropists like the Rothschilds and Montefiores.

As a birthday gift Debbie and I once bought him a silver tzedakah (charity) box. As he opened the gift, he told me that when he was a child his father, a Boston taxi driver, used to come home at night and put coins in the JNF pushke. Sheldon asked him what he was doing. "Giving money to the poor," his father replied. "But we're poor," Sheldon responded." His father said, "There is always someone poorer." The lesson stuck. By the time Sheldon's genius and industriousness led him to create the integrated resorts industry – synthesizing entertainment, exhibition, and convention facilities – he was giving billions to causes of every stripe.

Medical research and hospitals. Clinics fighting drug addiction. America's wounded warriors. Holocaust education and memory. And of course, organizations dedicated to protecting his beloved Israel. To Birthright Israel alone he contributed – together with Miri – nearly half a billion dollars, affording young Jews the world over the privilege his own father did not have the funds to realize, a chance to see the promised land.

To the extent that he gained huge influence as America's most generous political benefactor, he leveraged that influence to promote American interests and protect the Jewish people. Although Miri was born in Israel, her mother's family had been largely annihilated in Poland during the holocaust. Sheldon never forgot the lesson. The Jews must be strong if they are to survive and flourish.

All this is already quite well-known about the public Sheldon Adelson, including the moving story he told about how he had worn his late father's shoes upon his own first visit to Israel so that an impoverished taxi driver, who never had the financial resources to witness the Jewish state, could at least have his shoes trod where the patriarchs walked.

But what is not well-known – and what impressed me the most – was the private Sheldon Adelson. The man who, whenever I traveled with him, was always holding his wife Miri's hand. The tycoon who would interrupt meetings to call Miri and sing romantic tunes. The business magnate whose lock screen on his phone was of his two young sons, Adam and Matan, at so tender an age. I watched how in meetings, however critical, he would never fail to take his sons and daughters' phone calls.

Sheldon Adelson was, above all else, a family man who adored his wife and children like few I have witnessed.

And he was a loyal and loving friend. Once, after a professional setback, when I was licking my wounds and feeling low, he called me and said, "Friendship is all about shared values. You and I will always be friends because we believe in important things." Some billionaires only have billionaire friends. But at Sheldon's birthday parties and family celebrations, the wealthy guests were the exception rather than the rule. He surrounded himself with communal activists whose work he supported, doctors and nurses whose practices he funded, Rabbis and teachers whose educational efforts he supported, and artists and musicians whose creativity he helped to realize. And always, there were his children's friends.

I have worked as a rabbi for more than 30 years. But seldom have I met a man like Sheldon who oozed Jewish pride from every pore. He was traditional rather than orthodox, sentimental about his faith rather than a strict adherent. And yet to Sheldon, Jewish pride was an uncompromising article of faith, an absolute religion. Sometimes I would look at him in awe wondering how one man could so devote himself to the protection and needs of his people.

His office was a turnstile of world leaders seeking his wisdom and advice and he was a Jewish light unto the nations.

Once I walked alongside his wheelchair-scooter as he departed his office toward a waiting car. He was flanked by security as he whizzed through the Venetian lobby, guests of the hotel staring on in awe at the legendary entrepreneur. To a humble Rabbi like me, it was an awesome display of might and power. But to Sheldon it was just another opportunity to arrive at his car and insist I get in with him to hitch a ride alongside.

In Miri, he found his perfect soulmate, someone equally motivated to protect Israel in the highest ideals of American love for human-rights abiding democracies and free societies.

When Miri read in The New York Times of an Islamic couple in Afghanistan whom the Times had dubbed the Afghani Romeo and Juliet and were threatened with murder for dating outside their tribe, Miri undertook a years-long and successful effort to help save their lives and deliver them from danger. Sheldon watched enraptured. "My wife," he told an influential person on the other end of the phone whom he had called to enlist their help, "is a hopeless romantic. We must save the couple lives."

It sickens me to see fools on the internet who are criticizing Sheldon in death for his political engagement when those critics know nothing of how he lived to see Jerusalem recognized as Israel's eternal capital, how he despised Iran for their genocidal plans against his people, and how he pledged himself to a moral foreign policy opposing every American enemy who murdered our troops, in whose ranks he had himself once served. His political contributions – which were utterly dwarfed by his philanthropy – were dedicated to upholding the America-Israel alliance, protecting innocent life, and ensuring that a second Holocaust would remain an impossibility.

It is a sign of what a special man Sheldon was that my children called me today, one after the other, to say how much they will miss him and how tenderly they remembered him. It is a great comfort to know that his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, his full partner in business and philanthropy, will continue their shared legacy as the greatest Jewish philanthropists of our times.

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Two years ago, at his 85th birthday celebrations in Nevada, Sheldon arranged for his assembled friends to visit the Grand Canyon, a few hours drive from his Las Vegas home. Little did we all realize how symbolic the visit would be. For Sheldon Adelson would leave a chasm just as large in the fabric of global Jewish living. That was Sheldon Adelson. An American colossus. A Jewish giant. Utterly irreplaceable.

May Sheldon's memory be an eternal blessing and may God comfort his wife, his children, and the entire nation of Israel.

Shmuley Boteach is a rabbi, best-selling author, TV host, and public speaker.

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That day wouldn't pass before its cathartic effect was interrupted; now, by a small scandal that erupted from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's supposed remarks reported by The Jerusalem Post that "the Poles cooperated with the Nazis."

These were not the prime minister's words. What he did say was that "a not insignificant number of Poles had cooperated with the Nazis," which means something entirely different. The Jerusalem Post corrected their story and the Prime Minister's Office released a statement reaffirming that "PM Netanyahu spoke of Poles and not the Polish people or the country of Poland." Still, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki chose to cancel his trip to Israel this week to the Visegrád Group summit of Central European powers, which was set to be hosted in Jerusalem, dispatching his foreign minister instead.

Despite a brief, heated exchange between the foreign offices of Poland and Israel, it seemed the scandal would be short-lived and that we could resume the pursuit of our shared and stated goals of countering Iran and deepening bilateral ties between our nations. However, just as the tension began to subside, Israel's new acting foreign minister, Yisrael Katz – halfway through his first day on the job – decided to chime in with a diplomatic bombshell of his own.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Katz declared that "Poles collaborated with the Nazis, definitely. Collaborated with the Nazis." However, Katz would take things further, quoting the words of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who said that Poles "suckled anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk." He ended with his own observation that "[one] cannot sugarcoat this history."

The words had barely left his mouth when the Polish government announced its intention to withhold the visit by its foreign minister, too, which has since led to the cancellation of the entire Visegrád Group summit.

To be sure, the issue of Polish complicity in the Holocaust needs to be properly addressed in its full historical context. After all, this is an exceptionally sensitive issue, one better defined by nuance and exception than by broad generalizations and oversimplification.

On the one hand, few doubt the centuries of anti-Semitism in Poland, fueled as it was by a Catholic Church that saw Jews as deicides. (This was prior to the radical revamping of Catholic attitudes toward Judaism undertaken by the greatest Pole of the 20th century and the greatest of all popes, John Paul II.) Few, too, dispute the fact that tens of thousands of Poles abetted the Nazi slaughter of their nation's 3 million Jews, with Holocaust researchers having collected significant evidence of a large swath of Polish villagers that murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis, as well as the existence of Polish blackmailers who saw in Jewish helplessness an opportunity for financial gain. The Poles' very own Underground State's wartime Special Courts investigated 17,000 Poles who collaborated with the Germans, sentencing about 3,500 to death. The devastating Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946 – in which Polish villagers massacred 42 Jews returning from Nazi camps – all but confirmed the presence of deep-seated anti-Semitism among many Poles, as did the efficacy of the anti-Semitic persecutions set into motion by Soviet-backed Polish Interior Minister Gen. Mieczysław Moczar in March 1968, which spurred the mass emigration of what was left of Poland's Jewish community.

However, all of that is only a part of the story. There is another that puts forth a picture of a nation that fought bitterly against the Nazi beast and had many citizens take great risks to save Jewish lives and suffered brutally at the hands of the Germans as a result of both.

From the moment the Nazis invaded Poland at 5 a.m. on the morning of September 1, 1939, the Poles fought back. They were no match for the Germans and within weeks their country fell. Even so, the Poles never established a collaborative government with the Nazis in the way that France, Hungary, Norway, and even Belgium did. Even the Soviets, whom we credit with the liberation of the worst Nazi camps, willingly cooperated with Hitler far more than Poland did (the invasion of Poland, of course, being the best example). Poland never even surrendered to the Germans, choosing instead to evacuate its government and armed forces via Romania and Hungary to allied France and England, where it continued to direct an allied Polish resistance force known as the Home Army. The Polish government in exile even had Jewish members, the most famous being Szmul Zygielbojm, who committed suicide in London after the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in order to protest the Allies' reluctance to intervene on behalf of the hapless revolt. Another renowned member of this government was the non-Jewish Jan Karski, who stood at the forefront of Polish efforts to inform the global community of the atrocities being committed against his country's Jewish community. (He would later be made an honorary citizen of Israel.) The Polish Foreign Minister Count Edward Raczyński, too, used Karski's work to provide the Allies with one of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the Holocaust.

Clearly, there's more to the story than either side of this political debate currently claim. My grandfather moved to the United States from Poland about 1905 and often lamented the anti-Semitism he faced on a regular basis. Shamir's father was murdered by Polish villagers outside his hometown after jumping from a Nazi transport.

Still, to equate actions like these with the industrialized slaughter of the Holocaust is both inaccurate and unjust. Worse, it shifts the blame away from the German people who singularly planned, manned, and implemented the mass killing of European Jewry. For a foreign minister of the Jewish state, sophisticated historical insight and diplomatic sensitivity must outweigh popular sentiment and emotion in delivering the Israeli government's understanding of issues like these. His words were certainly not a great way to kick off his appointment as the chief foreign diplomat of the Jewish state.

Besides the question of content, there is also that of timing. Why would an Israeli official choose to attack Poland just four days after Poland stood with the Jewish state against Iran? Placing itself at odds with the entire EU, the small Eastern European nation chose to host the State Department's conference primed to enlist global support in re-enacting critical sanctions against Iran. It did this even as England, France, and – outrageously – Germany plot to undermine U.S. President Donald Trump's courageous decision to leave the Iran deal and punish the mullahs for their promise to enact a holocaust of their own.

If this doesn't bespeak a positive offer of friendship, I'm not sure what does.

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No, it was something else. Israel had won the Eurovision Song Competition. And although this was Israel's fourth victory, in many ways it was the Jewish state's sweetest victory.

First, it was the first time the country had won in two decades, since Dana International won with "Diva" in 1998. But back then there was no BDS and no global effort to boycott Israel. Sure, Arab countries were always trying to destroy Israel, either with military onslaughts or economic boycotts. But the rest of the world was not on board. But with BDS in the new millennium, people – especially in Europe – joined the bandwagon.

Former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters and other hard-core anti-Semites launched a campaign to bully singers and artists from performing in Israel. Even now, the pressure on artists not to perform in Israel is immense. When our organization, The World Values Network, published a full-page ad calling out the New Zealand singer Lorde for her bigotry in giving into the boycott and cancelling a scheduled performance in Israel, Waters got 100 top artists to sign a letter criticizing us and defending Lorde.

Such is the support for BDS in the artistic community.

Then along came Netta Barzilai.

With the unforgettable song "Toy," Netta dealt the BDS movement a catastrophic blow with her victory at Eurovision. Now, not only would artists from all over Europe be coming to Israel for the 2019 Eurovision competition, the eyes of the entire world would be watching as it took place in Tel Aviv.

Talk about a turnaround. And it all stemmed from the brave performance of one 25-year-old woman.

It made perfect sense, therefore, that Netta would become a primary target for BDS and its anti-Semitic warriors. Netta was an especially rich target because of how incredibly proud she is to be a Jewish and Israeli woman. Netta makes no apology whatsoever for being a citizen of the world's only Jewish state.

I watched Netta perform live in the United States and was overwhelmed by the verve and liveliness of her concert. I decided then and there that we had to host Netta at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Then, on Saturday night, came the news that a group of BDS activists had tried to humiliate Netta in front of all France during a live performance in which she appeared as winner of Eurovision 2018. The protesters held disgusting, openly anti-Semitic signs, which read (in French) "No to the Eurovision 2019 in Israel." BDS France took credit on Twitter for embarrassing the Israeli star, using the hashtags #DestinationApartheid and also #BoycottEurovision2019.

France 2, which broadcast the event, said following the incident: "Eurovision is above all entertainment on a unique international scale and open to great artistic diversity. Music, which has no borders, represents a universal ambition of dialogue between peoples, openness and living together."

What does that gobbledygook even mean? They should have said something like, "We are incredibly proud that reigning Eurovision champion Netta Barzilai of Israel graced us with her presence. We will brook no embarrassment of our esteemed guest and we condemn those who sought to humiliate her. Netta, we apologize profusely for this disgusting display and want to make it clear that it in no way represents French hospitality."

They didn't say that.

Which is why we in the global Jewish and pro-Israel community must rise to Netta's defense. Netta Barzilai is an Israeli hero and should be championed.

At our Champions of Jewish Values International Awards Gala at Carnegie Hall on March 28, we will present Netta with the Light of Israel Award. She will perform live. We will show the world how proud the Jewish community is to have a champion of her caliber and such an impressive ambassador for Israel. By doing so, we will deal another blow to the anti-Semitic BDS movement that seeks Israel's economic destruction and wants to see the Jewish people reduced to vassals.

That will never happen. We are never going back to those dark days when Jews were subservient. We demand equality, we will suffer no bigotry, we will accept no prejudice.

We are the chosen people, a light unto the nations. We have never understood this to mean any kind of superiority, just a divine responsibility to teach the world about the infinite worth of every individual, created equally in the image of the divine. The Jews were chosen to share the Ten Commandments with the world, a moral code by which we must all live and whose guiding spirit is that there are moral ethics, right and wrong, which govern human behavior.

And if there one thing we have learned is wrong, 70 years after the Holocaust, is that calling for boycotts of Jews and the economic destruction of the Jewish people is a slippery slope which leads to horrors that beggar the imagination.

Netta, we thank you and celebrate you. You have given the world Jewish community so much joy and pride.

And while New York is not Jerusalem, it has a robust and proud Jewish community that cannot wait to host you as the Jewish champion of the entire world.

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The prime minister responded in a moving letter where he spoke of his pain at Polish-Jewish tensions and asserted his strong belief that "no Jewish family, none of our Jewish brothers and sisters, could be saved during the Shoah without some form of help from Polish families, from Polish neighbors." The prime minister invited me to sit down and discuss the issue with him and I took him up on his gracious offer.

Morawiecki is a warm, highly intelligent and scholarly man of 50. A father of four who is always impeccably dressed and endlessly courteous, he evinces an earthiness and accessibility that is immediately endearing. He listens carefully and is deeply thoughtful in his responses. Our dinner, which stretched out over several hours, underscored to me how seriously he takes the tensions created by the Holocaust law and his deep pain at being at odds with the Jewish community and Israel.

The day before our dinner, President Bashar Assad of Syria had gassed and slaughtered his people again and I told the prime minister that genocide and mass murder remain global problems that are never sufficiently addressed. There existed the possibility that Poland, which witnessed the greatest genocide of all time taking place on its soil, could become a leading voice in fighting genocide and condemning the use of poison gas.

I told the prime minister that a leader of his eloquence could be that voice. But the Holocaust law, I asserted, undermined Polish credibility on the issue since it was viewed as an attempt by Poland to avoid discussion of its own culpability during the Holocaust, even if that culpability pertained to nonofficial collaboration on the part of large numbers of individual Poles.

The prime minister expressed his people's pain whenever they were bunched together with the Nazis. He gently conveyed the unjustness of lumping together victim and culprit. He said that Poland had lost 200,000 citizens in the autumn 1944 uprising alone. Poland had been the first to fight the Germans, had never collaborated as a people, had never collaborated as a government, and had been brutally suppressed by the Germans, and scores of Poles had helped to save many Jews. And while he did not add this, I am aware that nearly 2 million Polish civilians died during World War II.

The prime minister said that his government was Israel's strongest ally in Europe. He shared how he comes under repeated pressure from EU countries to join in various condemnations of Israel, from which he always abstains because of his genuine friendship with Israel and the Jewish people. He shared with me how his own children had attended a school in Poland run under Jewish auspices and that his family has Jewish friends so close that he was raised calling them uncles and aunts.

The purpose of the law was to lay blame for the Holocaust squarely where it belonged, with the German Nazis and not the Polish people. The prime minister shared that there was deep hurt on the part of the Polish people when their own suffering under the Nazis was not only not recognized, but are unjustly accused of having acted with the Germans.

But what of well-documented atrocities against Jews where Poles were directly involved? Jedwabne was mentioned at the dinner. There is, of course, also the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946 in which 42 Jews were murdered by Poles after the war was over. The prime minister was adamant that the law would never contravene fact and would never dispute the historical record. He said that he read widely on the war, had served as an academic, and would always respect the findings of academic research.

But why in that case was the law important at all? Poland is a democracy whose constitution guarantees freedom of expression. Let the historical facts decide. The prime minister maintained that the Polish people were hurt and angered by repeated use of expressions of "Polish death camps." The law was an attempt at righting a historical wrong. Indeed, U.S. President Barack Obama used the expression in May 2012, for which the White House later apologized.

But, I countered, the law was counterproductive and only increased accusations of Polish insensitivity to Jews.

What was clear from the conversation was that this controversial law, to which I am irrevocably opposed and hope will be struck down by the Polish courts who are currently reviewing it, might present an opportunity.

A great many Jews, including myself, are of Polish descent. My grandfather was born in Lomza, which I visited with my children last summer. But the story being passed through many Jewish families is that Poland was a place of irrevocable hostility to Jews and endless anti-Semitism.

Is that the whole story? Obviously not. Jews lived in Poland for 800 years. In that time they produced some of their greatest rabbis, works of scholarship, and synagogues of awe-inspiring beauty. Was there anti-Semitism? Undoubtedly so. Poland was deeply Catholic and the church itself held the Jews accountable for killing Christ.

But Poland was also the place that the Jews began to emigrate to in the 12th century because of the tolerant policies of Boleslaw III and the Polish Jewish community would become the largest and most developed in the world. Jews suffered in Poland, but they also thrived and flourished.

Are the Poles responsible for the Holocaust? Most definitely not. Any equation of Poles and Nazis is a historical abomination. The Poles fought the Germans and died under their brutal hand. The Germans built the gas chambers and murdered 3 million Polish Jews. Did large numbers of individual Poles collaborate with the Germans? Were many Poles happy to see the Jews gone? Historical fact would definitely suggest this was the case and certainly, after the war, when many Jews tried to reclaim property, they were met with a strong rebuff and many cases even violence. Poland cannot deny these historical truths. But that does not change the fact that the Polish government never collaborated with the Nazis and Polish partisans fought them throughout the war.

I shared with the prime minister that this was the reason I felt the new Holocaust law was so tragic. The history of Jews in Poland is undoubtedly more complex than what has been discussed up to this point. So why stifle a vital conversation that is long overdue? We need more interaction between Poles and Jews, not less. And the Polish government has done an absolutely admirable job in maintaining the Nazi death camps and memorializing the memory of the millions of Jews who died there. While I agree about the utter unfairness in using the term "Polish death camps," the law is an unfair and unjust attempt to criminalize a conversation that should be decided by historians and experts.

I do not believe there is any anti-Semitism in Morawiecki. In fact, I believe he seeks to be a friend of the Jewish people and truly wishes for Poland to have a closer relationship with the Jewish community and Israel. And that is another tragedy of this law, to which the Jewish community is justly opposed. It fosters misunderstanding, with both sides digging in when we should be joined in common cause for Holocaust memory and genocide prevention.

The prime minister also feels that the Jews have to better understand the extent of Polish suffering under the Nazis, even as it did not, of course, reach mass extinction as with the Jews. He is right. But the law has hindered those efforts.

What's needed is the abolition of this law so that misunderstandings can be addressed honestly and forthrightly and a new era of Polish-Jewish relations can ensue.

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That being said, when a renowned Jewish opinion-maker takes to the pages of The New York Times to offer highly unfair and poorly argued criticism of Israel, it demands a response.

I was astonished to see that Ron Lauder, a life-long Zionist, defender of Israel and longtime leader of the World Jewish Congress, would choose the occasion of Israel's 70th anniversary to launch a blisteringly unmerited and unreasonable critique of the Jewish state in The New York Times. The fact that The Times would publish it was less surprising given, that one way to get an op-ed accepted is by attacking Israel and there is no telling how many others have tried and mostly failed to document Israel's virtues on its pages. Still, it saddened me to see a leader of Lauder's stature assail Israel and make such shockingly irresponsible statements about Israeli policy.

While many critics might claim that attacking Israel publicly is their only way of getting out their message, this argument does not apply to Lauder. As a wealthy philanthropist and leader of a global Jewish agency, Lauder has direct access to the highest levels of Israel's government. He could walk into the Prime Minister's Office and deliver the same message, but he either is frustrated by the weakness of his unconvincing arguments or the fact that Israel's democratically elected government does not need his advice. Someone of his status is used to getting his way, and not having to listen to constituents, so perhaps a public tantrum is his response to being told "no."

By taking his criticism public, Lauder appears to have adopted the J Street attitude of holding Israel's people in contempt, and not accepting their democratic judgment to elect leaders that reflect their views. Hopefully, he has not tilted so far toward J Street that he will start advocating that the United States pressure Israel to adopt his preferred positions.

It is simply contemptible for someone, no matter their stature, to tell Israelis from the comfort of their New York penthouse what is in their best interest. It is only Israelis who serve in the military, like my son and daughter, and Israelis who send their children to do the same, who have the right to decide matters involving their peace and security. Israelis have repeatedly had to fight and die for their freedom and wish nothing more than to live in peace with their neighbors. Their desire for peace is so great they have made great sacrifices and taken enormous risks by evacuating Sinai, the Gaza Strip, and much of the West Bank, often with disastrous and unfortunate results. The gamble on Sinai, once thought to have paid off by producing peace with Egypt, has today produced an ISIS state on Israel's border that Egypt cannot control. The concessions to the Palestinians have only resulted in greater terror and insecurity.

Who is Lauder to lecture Israelis on the wisdom of further concessions?

Lauder has bought into the false idea that the only possibility for peace is a two-state solution and that Israeli policies "threaten to derail this opportunity." He acknowledges "Palestinian incitement and intransigence are destructive" as if these are trivial matters when they are at the core of the conflict. He should know better than to repeat the nonsense about settlements obstructing peace given that the Palestinians were not interested in peace when there was not a single Jew living in the West Bank. Israel's government has every right to decide who can live where and whether it is in the nation's best interest to annex territory that even the Palestinians have agreed would be part of Israel should a peace agreement ever be signed.

Lauder is also angry about Israel's policies related to religion. Diaspora Jews have the right to decide how to worship, but they do not have a say in how religion is practiced in Israel. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in Israel and it is up to Israelis to determine how they will exercise that right. As a democracy, Israelis can also vote to change policies they do not like. Lauder's argument that Israel is becoming a theocracy would be news to the hundreds of thousands of people who march in Tel Aviv's gay pride parade or to Israel's secular majority. Two weeks ago, I hosted Caitlyn Jenner at our annual World Values Network gala where she praised Israel for being ahead of the United States in allowing openly transgender soldiers to serve in the military.

That does not mean that Israelis are all perfectly comfortable with the power of Orthodox parties. Indeed, many are uncomfortable. But the voters for those parties are also part of the electorate and America also debates religiously influenced issues like gay marriage, abortion, contraception, and public prayer all the time. Even as many Israelis bristle at what they see is the increased power of the religious parties, they still choose – when they practice Judaism – to do so via Orthodox custom.

It is also shameful for Lauder to blame "assimilation, alienation and a severe erosion of the global Jewish community's affinity for the Jewish homeland" on Israel. Jews in the Diaspora are not abandoning their faith because of any Israeli policies. They are doing so for several totally unrelated reasons and the answer is to educate and embrace the millennials he is worried about and not expect them to cling to Judaism if Israel suddenly stops building settlements or opens an egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall.

Assimilation and intermarriage rates in the United States are very high. They are being reversed by outstanding organizations like Chabad who employ the late Lubavitcher rebbe's vision of spreading a positive Jewish message rather than Lauder's method of attacking the Jewish state.

Young Jews are not abandoning Israel. Yes, they may question Israeli policies and, yes, they are unwilling to accept the traditional way of teaching Israel's history through rose-colored glasses. The answer again is not to demand that Israel change policies in hopes of soothing the angst of young Diaspora Jews. Lauder and others should be investing more in educating them about the real Israel rather than the one they may encounter on campus via leftist academics who had little sympathy for Israel even when left-leaning prime ministers like Shimon Peres were in power.

I still remember hosting Peres in his post-prime ministerial years at Cambridge University in the U.K. where a student group tried to have him arrested for war crimes in Lebanon.

Jewish groups on campus must teach students that love of Israel rests on thousands of years of Jewish connection to our ancient homeland and deep respect for the country, a great bastion of human rights, as Jenner proclaimed from our stage to the world's media.

Lauder says, "The leadership of the Jewish world always honors the choices made by the Israeli voter and acts in concert with Israel's democratically elected government," and yet he has decided that "loyalty requires a friend to speak out and express an inconvenient truth."

No, Ron, loyalty requires a friend to express his views fairly and respectfully, even if they involve disagreement, and then accept the results of the democratic process. If you don't like the decision, you can make aliyah, automatically become a citizen, and use that same democratic process to try to change the policies you don't like. You are likely to find that most Israelis disagree with your increasing pessimism about Israel and that this is an "inconvenient truth" that they would respectfully offer you.

Either way, Mr. Lauder, we're all grateful for your lifelong dedication to Jewish life, especially in Eastern Europe where you pioneered so much outstanding work. That's the work you should be continuing rather than penning unreasonable harangues against America's foremost ally that continues to function as a thriving democracy in the sea of Middle East tyranny.

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